I have a series of Adobe FrameMaker books for the aviation industry. The footers in each file have to be updated with effectivity data that is maintained in a large, complex spreadsheet. My primary tools are ExtendScript (Adobe’s version of Javascript, built into FrameMaker), Excel, and EDT.
Here is a partial screenshot of my FrameMaker book.
First, I use ExtendScript to output a list of the book’s filenames so I can check them against the client’s spreadsheet data. I copy them to the Clipboard and use EDT to save the list to Excel.
Then, I use a complex EDT transform to isolate the effectivity data from the client’s spreadsheet.
I output the isolated data to a spreadsheet. I use an EDT Join to make sure that I have a spreadsheet entry for each file in the book.
The Explore Keys dialog is useful for verification.
After spot-checking the data and verifying the Join, I export the data to an XML file.
Finally, I run an ExtendScript script in FrameMaker that uses the XML data to update each document’s effectivity block in the footer.
