Hello,
First post on the forums in a long time, and first here altogether. I hope it's okay to jump in.
I have a bit of unstructured FM experience from several years ago and have been using Ventura since (13 years) for my company's books (longish directories--3,000+/volume). I've done some scripts in Ventura so have a little programming experience.
We're looking to switch to XML rather than the tagged text files Ventura can import because of its lack of support, problems possibly due to Win7, and the effort needed to maintain the import files. I've downloaded the FM 11 trial and have been experimenting a little with roundtripping XML and also importing what we already have in XML. So a few I'm sure very basic questions; and thanks in advance:
I've been going through the Adobe tutorials and whatever else I can find online. There don't seem to be any well-reviewed books on Amazon that deal with structured FM 9-11. Some that look promising for XML are about 10 years old--I don't think our needs are cutting edge so should I get something that old, or stick with newer even if there are complaints? Any recommendations? If I can get the hang of it with something that isn't FM specific will it be really hard to adapt that knowledge to FM?
I'm finding EDD, DTD, and Schema to be rather confusing. Would someone explain the difference in simple terms or point me to a video, etc? Assuming I'm starting with an XML file created for another purpose not meant for FM, do I need more than one of these? Do you do one first?
With Ventura if I want to have two discrete pieces of data (off the database) on the same line, say one left aligned and the other right aligned, the programmers put the two together with a tab, and that's controlled by a paragraph tag in Ventura with a right tab. With XML, if I'm understanding it correctly, you wouldn't do that in the XML file--I'm probably not ready to understand the method, just want to know if that's possible without doing something like having the second item's paragraph properties set to have no line break. If so, where would that be specified, EDD, DTD, etc?
Can XML into FM include graphics inline? How about an Excel chart?
Thank you,
Gary