HOW TO START WITH FRAME MAKER SCRIPTING?

[aghil2101]

Hello Everyone.

I am Mechanical Customization Engineer. Currently i am developing automation tools for Mechanical designing software's using VB.NET.

Now i have a requirement on FRAME MAKER for one of our client. The thing is i have a PDF (or MS Word) file which contains Pictures, Notes & Tables. I need to export just tables to Frame Maker and change the table styles that is the scope of the project. Please see the below image from this i need to copy just the tables

and paste in Frame Maker.

I am good in VB.NET(VB Scripting) so is it possible to do this process using VB. If not how best i can do this. When i went through the forum i saw that an FDK has to be downloaded. Can anybody please guide me on where should i start. I went through lot of discussions with in the forum but i am confused with the starting steps.

With Regards

Aghil.M

[4everJang]

Aghil,

This is not a task you want to program, especially if you have no experience in FrameMaker and in scripting for FrameMaker (which is completely different from VB.net). FDK is the C++ development environment and has nothing to do with scripting.

Your employer should hire one of the scripting experts present on this forum to do this job. That would be infinitely more cost effective than asking just any programmer in the company to fix this problem. To be able to create decent FrameMaker scripts, you need to have a good understanding of how that software handles all of its objects and data. That is not something you simply pick up by posting a question on a forum.

Kind regards

Jang

[aghil2101]

Hi 4everJang​

Sorry to disturb you sir. I downloaded the Extended Script Toolkit. And i did few sample coding what i got from internet and which are available in the Frame Maker sample files.

I need few info regarding my work.

What i thought is import the word file/ pdf to Frame Maker as a book, then from that book copy all the tables and paste it into a new book.

Later i found that importing pdf to Frame Maker is possible by single page by page, so i tried with word file and i was able to import it.

What i want to know is am i going on the correct track. or is there any better way around to export tables to Frame Maker from word/pdf file.

I know i am going little fast. But sir please guide me on this one part.

With Regards

Aghil.M

[4everJang]

Hello Aghil,

You are very much off track. PDF creation and import is NOT something to be doing at any point in this process.

Just start with opening your Word documents in FrameMaker. You will find that a LOT of stuff is automatically recognized by FrameMaker. Then you may be able to automate some of the work on the resulting tables in FrameMaker, but if they need to be processed by authors manually anyway, I would not expect any scripting to be required at all.

Sometimes things are much easier than you expect, but you have to look at the problem a bit more to figure it out.

Kind regards

Jang

[aghil2101]

Hi 4everJang​

Thanks a lot jang for showing me a path. i tried the steps manually and it was working fine.Is it possible to automate the importing word file task. If you have any examples or API's which i can make use of it will be very helpful.

With Regards

Aghil.M

[aghil2101]

Hi 4everJang​

Thank a lot for the reply. i completely understood your point. I really want to do this job my own i know its gonna take lot of time for me since i am new to this tool.

I was going through one Scripting Guide for Frame Maker there i found that as VBA in MS Office for adobe there is something called as Extend Scripting So as of now i am going through it. If you have any tutorial things on the same. It will be very helpful for me too go further.

With Regards

Aghil.M