TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
If you insist on going from Word to *unstructured* Maker, then to
structured Maker...
What you will ultimately do is create a conversion table that changes
the unstructured docs into structured docs. So you need to have at
least a clue about the structure you intend. Of course your docs will
break up into Sections and Subsections. Do you expect to have different
types of XML sections with different names to correspond to your
categories such as InstallationSection, HardwareProcedureSection,
SoftwareProcedureSection, TroubleShootingProcedureSection, etc.? Or
will they just be Sections that contain Procedures? If the former, then
you should consider separate series of headings:
That will make it easier to split things at the same section *level*
into these different explicit categories. On the other hand, that type
of a categorical split - one based on the *content* and not the
*structure* - is generally considered a bad thing to express through the
actual element names. That sort of division is better left to
attributes. You need to look up in the Struct Dev Guide (Maker online
manual) whether or not you can set attribute values through a conversion
table. If so, then you may still want to use these sorts of divisions
in your unstructured Maker files.
If, on the other hand, you just use consistent headings for the levels
of sections, and let the content express the categories, then you can
suck H1, H2, H3, etc. into different levels of section, and leave it at
that.
I get the feeling I'm rambling... Need... More.... Coffee! Read the
Structured Application Developer's guide that comes with Maker (well,
look it over - especially the section on conversion tables.) And you
should begin to immerse yourself in XML - design strategies and the
like. And don't discount the suggestion that you use an existing DTD.
Whatever you do, the more you know about the final goal (XML), the
better your initial decisions will be.
