WWP Standard Edition 

Can WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition Save You Money?

(White paper written and published by Scriptorium Publishing Services, Inc.)

A brief history of HTML conversion

FrameMaker’s built-in HTML conversion support has a long and somewhat checkered history. In version 5, FrameMaker shipped with WebWorks Lite, which was universally derided as useless, mainly because users could not save mappings. In version 5.5, FrameMaker included a Save As HTML feature, which received more positive reviews, but it was still quite limited.

As conversion from FrameMaker to online formats became an important part of many technical documentation efforts, users have chosen to work with third-party tools, such as MIF2GO and WebWorks Publisher.

In FrameMaker version 6, Adobe has included Quadralay’s WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition. This development was met with some skepticism by the user community because of the history with WebWorks Lite.

This paper examines whether WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition, which is free to FrameMaker users (it’s included in the price of a FrameMaker 6 [and FrameMaker 7] license), can help organizations reduce their need for licenses of the quite expensive WebWorks Publisher Professional Edition.

Contents

• What is WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition?
• Modifying headers, footers, and colors
• Mapping styles
• Limitations in WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition
• WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition vs. Professional Edition
• Mixing and matching the Standard Edition and the Professional Edition
• Conclusion
• Contacting us

What is WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition?

Quadralay’s WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition converts FrameMaker files to Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Markup Language (XML). WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition lets you customize the output you produce in several different ways:

• By customizing the page templates, which determine the information in the header and footer of each output page
• By mapping FrameMaker paragraph, character, and table styles to various WebWorks Publisher styles
• By changing configuration settings (called user macros in WebWorks Publisher)

To convert FrameMaker files to another file format, you link (or map) FrameMaker formats (such as paragraph tags, character tags, and table tags) to formats in one of the following WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition templates:

• Portable HTML Standard Edition
• Dynamic HTML Standard Edition
• XML+CSS Standard Edition
• XML+XSL Standard Edition

The basic conversion process works as follows:

1. You create a WebWorks Publisher project that contains the files you want to convert.
2. WebWorks Publisher converts the FrameMaker files to Maker Interchange Format (MIF), which is a tagged text file.
3. WebWorks Publisher scans the MIF files and creates a list of the tags that are used in the files, including paragraph tags, character tags, and table tags.
4. You map the FrameMaker tags to Publisher styles.
5. Publisher generates the output files.

Quadralay also produces a more powerful version of WebWorks Publisher, called WebWorks Publisher Professional Edition. Using the Professional Edition, you can create online help formats, such as WinHelp, HTML Help, and JavaHelp, from your FrameMaker files. The Professional Edition also provides much more powerful customization features.

Modifying headers, footers, and colors

WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition uses the table of contents from your FrameMaker book to produce an online table of contents. This file automatically creates links for all of the TOC entries and strips the page numbers. The figure shows a table of contents in HTML.

The navigation bar is created automatically on every generated page. You can customize (or remove) the logos and the navigation bar by modifying the Normal.asp, Index.asp, and TOC.asp files. This process is identical to the process you use in WebWorks Publisher Professional Edition. You open the template files in a text or HTML editor and make changes. For example, Normal.asp contains the following information for the logo and contact information at the bottom right of each HTML and XML page:

<table align="right" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">  <tr>    <td align="right"><font size="1">    <a href="http://www.webworks.com"><img src="images/webworks.gif"      width="150" height="20" border="0"></a><br>    Quadralay Corporation<br>    http://www.webworks.com<br>    Voice: (512) 719-3399<br>    Fax: (512) 719-3606<br>    <a href="mailto:sales@webworks.com">sales@webworks.com</a><br>    </font></td>  </tr></table> 

You can change it to this (changes are bold):

<table align="right" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">  <tr>    <td align="right">Scriptorium Publishing<br>    <a href="http://www.scriptorium.com">www.scriptorium.com</a>    </td>  </tr></table>

The following figure shows the result of the new Normal.asp code in the output files.

To modify the colors used in the document, locate the <BODY> tag, which looks like this by default:

<body link="#3366CC" vlink="#9999CC" text="#000000" alink="#0000CC"bgcolor="#FFFFFF" background="images/backgrnd.gif"> 

This code determines the color of the text, the image used for the background, and the like.

You can change these attributes to specify the colors that you want to use. The color code is a pound sign (#) followed by two characters for red, two characters for green, and two characters for blue. Each two-character combination can range from 00 to FF (hexadecimal). For example, bright blue would be: #CCCCFF

Mapping styles

In WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition, you can assign mapping to your FrameMaker paragraph, character, table, and cross-reference formats. When you map styles, you essentially “wrap” the text from the FrameMaker file in an HTML or XML tag. For example, the paragraph:

This is a body paragraph. 

uses the Body style in your FrameMaker files. You map the Body style to the WebWorks Publisher Body paragraph style, and the result is something like this:

<p>This is a body paragraph.</p>

WebWorks Publisher provides default paragraph mapping styles, which let you map most of the basic styles you expect in a document. The mapping window is shown in the figure above.

The following styles are available in the default templates:

The provided styles cover many of your basic requirements, but a few of the missing items include note styles, where the word Note is boldface and the rest of the text is regular font weight.

If you don’t like the styles provided in the default templates, you’re out of luck. You cannot modify these styles except to change the default font and heading color, and you cannot add new styles in the Standard Edition.

Limitations in WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition

The major limitations in WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition are the following:

• Help templates (WinHelp and HTML Help, for example) will not run in WebWorks Publisher. Only templates built from HTML or XML templates are functional.
• You cannot create new styles.
• Modifying existing styles is limited to those items available on the User Macros list, which are the default font and heading color.

There are also a few minor annoyances. For example:

• Before generating your files, you must go into FrameMaker and set the conditional text Show/Hide settings to show exactly the information you want in the HTML output. You cannot set conditions in the Standard Edition (but you can in the Professional Edition).
• You cannot map marker styles.

WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition vs. Professional Edition

The limitations of the Standard Edition disappear if you move up to the Professional Edition. The Professional Edition adds the following features:

• Style Designer, which lets you add, modify, and delete WebWorks Publisher styles.
• Conditions mapping tab, which lets you set Show/Hide conditions differently from the source files for the output.
• Marker mapping tab, which lets you control how custom markers are processed (after you create styles for them in the Style Designer).
• Support for all templates, including HTML, XML, JavaHelp, WinHelp, HTML Help, and WebWorks Help.
• A Scripts tab, which lets you add, edit, and delete pre- and postprocessing scripts.
• A Log tab, which lets you see the generation log file, which is very helpful for troubleshooting.

Mixing and matching the Standard Edition and the Professional Edition

WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition will open templates developed in WebWorks Publisher Professional Edition, provided that the templates are based on one of the HTML templates (Portable or Dynamic HTML) or one of the XML templates. The Standard Edition will not open help templates—HTML Help, WinHelp, WebWorks Help, and JavaHelp.

If you are generating HTML or XML output, consider developing a custom template in WebWorks Publisher Professional and then distributing that to users who have only the Standard Edition.

This approach would also allow you to outsource development of the template to a consultant. If you do not want to invest in bringing one of your employees up to speed on WebWorks Publisher template development, this could be a cost-effective way to get the customized output you want without having to go through a long learning curve with a new tool.

If you are producing HTML or XML, you can use the Standard Edition as an output generation engine and reserve the Professional Edition for the template designer (whether that person is an employee or a vendor). The disadvantage to this approach is that you are dependent on the template designer for any updates. But at the same time, this has some advantages because it means that the end users must strictly follow the standard template—they will not be able to change it through the Standard Edition.

Quadralay has announced a template store that sells templates for the Standard and Professional Editions, but at this time, the selection is quite limited. A number of third-party consultants (including Scriptorium Publishing [and cap studio]) offer custom template development.

Conclusion

WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition can reduce your total software costs, provided that your conversion effort is HTML or XML based. Here are some basic guidelines:

• If you need to output help formats, you’ll need the Professional Edition to generate any output. [cap-studio: You need the Professional Edition only to create such a setup, generation of help source files can be made to work with Standard Edition.]
• If your output requirements are relatively simple and you like the Standard Edition templates, you can use them, make simple modifications, and avoid having to purchase the Professional Edition.
• If your output requirements are more demanding than the basic Standard Edition templates but are based on HTML or XML output, you can purchase one Professional Edition license to produce templates, and then distribute the templates to Standard Edition users, who can generate the output.
• If you do not want to invest in the Professional Edition, consider a third-party vendor for template creation.

Contacting us

Scriptorium Publishing Services, Inc. excels at transforming complex technical ideas into clear, concise documents. Our clients, who range from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies, rely on us for the full spectrum of technical publishing services—everything from turnkey documentation to specialized technical editing and consulting. Our expert, talented staff thrives on working with challenging new technology in a deadline-driven environment.

If you have any questions about Scriptorium Publishing Services, Inc., contact:

Scriptorium Publishing Services, Inc.
P.O. Box 12761
Research Triangle Park, NC 27709, USA
919-481-2701
sales @ scriptorium.com
http://www.scriptorium.com