Presently utilizing Framemaker+SGML 7.2 environment, along with version 7.1 of the FDK. Our organization has a group of users that utilize templates to input structured information to generate validated SGML, specific to DTDs, that is then used as input to generate a number of other formats XML, HTML, KML.
My question is, presently all the information is manually keystroked into the templated SGML elements. There are external resources that I have available that could enable prepopulation of the templates with information, and eliminate much of the manual input--very labor intensive. This could speed up input and accuracy. These sources include:
- Unstructured Microsoft word documents.
- Sybase database.
- Web service requests that could provide me an XML instance.
- XML fragments.
Are there any FDK resources available that would enable me to utilize this external information so that I can assist our users with prepopulating our templates? There is currently a stigma attached with Framemaker in our production environment. The markup of the information is the bottleneck. If not, would upgrading to version 9.0 provide any capability to resolve this issue?
If there are any of these resources available, can you direct me to examples or provide code fragment examples. I am not a native C programmer.