Does FrameMaker 9 for Windows have an equivalent to fmbatch?

[K***@adobeforums.com]

Does FrameMaker 9 have an equivalent to fmbatch? We use fmbatch on Unix to automatically generate our documentation set (50+ books) as PDF on a nightly basis. Doing this by hand would be extremely tedious and inefficient. Given that FrameMaker 8 is the the last Unix version that Adobe is supporting, it's critical to us to be able to schedule this task. So is there any facility in FM9 for automatically opening a set of books and saving them as PDF, and for scheduling this task?

Ken.

[A***@adobeforums.com]

Ken,

You can try one of the following freebie FM batch tools for Windows:

DZbatcher from Datazone (http://www.datazone.com)
DoBatch from Cudspan available at
http://www.freeframers.org/freeware/cud/
runfm from Omni Systems at http://www.omsys.com

I don't know how well they work with FM9, though - only runfm has any
kind of support,

The alternative is to use FrameScript, which has a command line batch
interface to get FM going and start up a script, see RunEslBatch in
the User Guide.

[K***@adobeforums.com]

Thanks Arnis! I'll be checking out these solutions. From a quick look, it seems like the Omni Systems tool might work for us, and they do say they support FM9.

Ken.

[K***@adobeforums.com]

Hi Arnis,

Can you give me a little more detail on FrameScript - I'm not familiar with it; and which User Guide are you referring to?

Thanks,
Ken.

[A***@adobeforums.com]

Ken,

You can get more info by visiting http://www.framescript.com

The documentation is available at
http://www.framescript.com/Download/Document_Library.htm and I was
referring to the User Guide here.

There also are some additional tutorials and the greatest reference
book for Framescript available at Rick Quatro's site:
http://www.frameexpert.com

There's an active FrameScript list on Yahoo at:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/framescript-users/