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13
W h a t y o u c a n d o w i t h s t r u c t u r e A P I c l i e n t s
Treating special characters In SGML and XML you can use an entity to represent
special characters. You might use rules to translate such entities.
XML: The XML specification establishes predefined character entities for reserved
characters such as angle brackets. By default FrameMaker translates these
characters correctly on import and export. However, you will need to specify read/
write rules to export such characters as a numeric references (&#XXXX;).
Making information implicit Not all information relevant to one representation is relevant
to the other. For example, you may have a type of table that always has two columns. In
XML you have an element for this table and do not need to explicitly indicate in the
document instance that the table has two columns. Nevertheless, in FrameMaker you need
to specify a number of columns when you insert the table. By default, the software writes
an attribute containing the number of columns on export; you can choose instead to specify
this information in a read/write rule.
Unwrapping structure You may have levels of hierarchical element structure in one
representation that are unnecessary in the other. If you are translating documents from one
system to the other and don't need to translate those documents back again, you may
decide to simplify the element hierarchy.
Other rules There are a few rules that aren't used for any of the above purposes. These
rules are discussed in detail in Chapter 26, "Read/Write Rules Reference." Sections of the
chapter that describe examples of such rules include:
•
"character map" on page 369 describes the rule that tells FrameMaker how to map
between characters in the SGML and FrameMaker character sets.
•
"external dtd" on page 392 describes the rule that determines whether to include an
external DTD subset or to copy the specified DTD into the internal DTD subset. By
default, FrameMaker includes an external DTD subset.
•
"line break" on page 443 describes the rule that tells FrameMaker how to interpret line
breaks when importing an XML or SGML document and when to generate line breaks
when exporting a FrameMaker document.
•
"write structured document" on page 466 and "write structured document instance only"
on page 466 describe the rules that tell FrameMaker when saving as markup whether it
should write only a markup document instance or an entire document.
What you can do with structure API clients
In situations in which read/write rules are insufficient to express the proper translation
between markup and FrameMaker, you can create a structure API client. You use the
Frame Developer's Kit (FDK) to modify the import or export of markup documents. You
cannot use the FDK to directly modify how the parser creates a DTD or an EDD.
Introduction to Translating between Markup Data and FrameMaker
202
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