14.4.3.6 Providing aliases for paragraph formats
If you are generating DITA from an unstructured FrameMaker document, your document might use the same format for different purposes, each purpose requiring that format to be mapped to a different DITA element, or to be nested in a different hierarchy, or both; or you might have several formats that map to the same DITA element. Because DITA uses semantic tags, whereas FrameMaker uses presentational tags, in some cases you need alternate names for paragraph formats to clarify semantic use cases.
To specify an alternate name, or alias, for a paragraph format:
; Frame paragraph format = Frame format name to use in place of that
; paragraph format for DITA purposes
An alias works in any [DITA*] configuration section that uses format names. The alias can be the name of another paragraph format in your document, provided the two formats map to exactly the same element with all the same DITA settings; or, the alias can be a name you invent.
For additional aliases for the same format, insert a DITAAlias marker in each instance of the format that requires a different alias, with content the name of another alias. You can also use a DITAAlias marker to override an alias assigned in section [DITAAlias].
You can use as many different aliases for the same paragraph format as your document requires. If you are creating new alias names, be careful not to duplicate the name of a format that is already in the FrameMaker paragraph catalog.
You might need to create aliases in the following situations:
One-to-many mappings of the same format to different DITA elements
Many-to-one mappings of two or more formats to the same DITA element.
Suppose your FrameMaker document includes a paragraph format named Body2, used in the following situations:
• most often as a continuation of a Numbered1 or Numbered paragraph
• less often as a continuation of a Bulleted paragraph
• occasionally as a quotation, not part of any list.
This means that in different places in your document Body2 would have to be mapped to different elements, or participate in different DITA hierarchies.
To resolve this conflict, you would assign aliases to the alternate uses of Body2. You could keep the original format name for the most frequent use; however, the name Body2 does not convey anything about the differing semantics. Therefore you might want to use aliases for every use; for example, Body2OList, Body2UList, and Body2Quote.
To create an alias for the most prevalent use of Body2:
For the other two uses of Body2, you would have to insert a DITAAlias marker in each instance, with content one of the other aliases: Body2UList or Body2Quote. Then you could specify the following in configuration file mif2htm.ini:
Suppose your FrameMaker document includes three different paragraph formats for quotations:
All three map to DITA element <lq>. You can make this semantic equivalence explicit in section [DITAAlias], and use the collective alias in other configuration sections:
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