By Aoyon Choudhary

This article is relevant to authors who use Framemaker/WebWorks/Acrobat Distiller combination to deliver documents as HTML and/or PDF files. Typically, in such a setup, you may author in FrameMaker and then use Adobe Acrobat Distiller to generate PDF and Quadralay WebWorks Automap to generate HTML.

Acrobat Distiller is a WYSIWYG tool, and you can be assured that the PDF will look almost identical to your FrameMaker document. Quadralay WebWorks on the other hand uses the character and paragraph tags in the FrameMaker source file along with the graphics import style/method to generate the text and graphics in HTML.

FrameMaker provides us two ways of using images in a document:

• Copy into document
• Import by reference

So, the question is which is the most suitable method? Listed below are the pros and cons of both methods.

First, let us see how WebWorks processes the same image when copied or imported into a document. We are assuming that WebWorks is configured to created GIF images from FrameMaker documents.

Source Image 1:

Source Image 2:

Output Image 1:

Output Image 2: 

Output Image 1:

Output Image 2:

You can see that the generated images when used by reference are significantly better than images used by copy method.

Let us now see what the WebWorks settings were for processing GIFs when copied into a Frame document and when used by reference:

As you can see, when an image is used by reference, WebWorks simply copies over the image. No processing is done on the image. However, if the image is copied into the anchored frame, WebWorks does a complete processing of the image inside the anchored frame. For GIFs, WebWorks uses the standard 256 color template and tries to map the color coding of the embedded image to the standard template. This results in the generated GIF appear different from the source image. This is probably the most significant reason why one should use the import by reference method as much as possible.

An important point to remember is the WebWokrs behavior if there is anything else in the anchored frame other than the image imported by reference, such as callouts, another anchored frame etc. In such case, WebWorks will treat the image as if it was used by Copy method.

The other reasons for using the import by reference method are:

1. You can use the same image at multiple places.
2. You can update all instances of an image by updating it at one place.
3. The FrameMaker file is smaller and more manageable.
4. The rendition process takes significantly less time, as images imported by reference need not be processed.

The cons are as follows:

1. We sometimes use the anchored frame in FrameMaker to hide some portions of an image. When the images are used by reference, the hidden portions will also get displayed in the HTML. However, PDFs will come out fine.
2. Large images are sometimes scaled in the anchored frame. When using images by reference, the scaling will be lost in the resultant HTML. The PDFs will come out fine.
3. You have to manage multiple files.
4. Due to file naming problems (such as a space), some files may not appear in HTML even though they are displayed in FrameMaker (UNIX only).

(Aoyon Choudhary works as a Technical Publications Consultant with Cadence Design Systems, Noida. Aoyon is currently architecting the documentation suite of a new product and provides support to Frame templates and Webworks filters used across the corporation. He is the author of the bestseller, Java APIs for XML (SAMS Publishing, ISBN: 0672324342)).

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