Appendix C. IRIS Insight Book-Building Architecture

This appendix describes the current IRIS InSight book-building architecture and process.

Book-Building Architecture

Figure C-1 shows the general process flow for building the textual content of an InSight book. Following the figure is a more detailed text description of the process.

Figure C-1. Architecture for Book-Building


Authors compose a book using FrameMaker, then “compile” the book into an InSight viewable book:

  • The FrameMaker files (.doc) are converted to Maker Interchange Format (.mif) using FrameMaker's fmbatch utility. A special file, conditional.doc, is used during this process to force the proper FrameMaker conditionals to be applied.

  • The next phase is to translate the MIF files (.mif) into SGML files (.sgm) using the mif2sgml translator from Silicon Graphics. After each file is translated, the .sgm file is scanned to see whether it contains any CGM figure references. CGM figures are generated from FrameMaker line art. If the .sgm file contains CGM figure references then it is run through Carberry's miftocgm utility and every anchored frame is converted to a CGM image. The file is scanned again to convert the CGM images to GIF images for use by InSight.

  • Once all the SGML files have been generated for the book, they're concatenated and the indexgen utility is run over them to create a back-of-the-book index. This index is then concatenated to the rest of the SGML files, and an <SGIDOC> </SGIDOC> tag pair is wrapped around the result to create the master SGML file that is fed into EBT's mksgidoc command to create an InSight viewable book.