1-Visitor

Question

FOSI Retirement Notice

Forum|Forum|11 years ago
December 8, 2014
24 replies
6219 views

I just read about PTC's plans for FOSI retirement-see below. The news came to me on Friday in "(Updated) - 2014 Arbortext Announcements" in my daily "PTC Technical Support Subscriptions" email

The announcement below says they will continue to include the FOSI composition engine in future releases, but will no longer have any maintenance releases or patches related to it.

So, I'm wondering, Should we start migrating our FOSI style sheets to Styler or should we continue to put all our eggs in the FOSI basket since the composition engine that works for us now will be available with future Arbortext products?

2014 Arbortext Announcements

July 2015: FOSI Retirement Notice

* Beginning July 1, 2015, PTC will change the level of support for the FOSI composition engine from Standard to Sustained.

* This includes the use of XSL-FO, the FOSI Editor and the Arbortext line numbering application.

* Customers with an active Global Support agreement may continue contact PTC Technical Support as well as have continued access to technical support web tools, the knowledgebase and prior maintenance releases.

* However, there will be no additional maintenance releases or patches related to the FOSI composition engine.

* The FOSI composition engine will continue to be included in the Arbortext suite of products, and customers may continue to use existing FOSI stylesheets.

--Jack
LSI, Inc.
Jacksonville, FL

naglists

1-Visitor

My 12/5 PTC Technical Support Subscriptions email did not include this
notice.

And: Gah!

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 9:42 AM, Kulas, Jack <->
wrote:

> I just read about PTC's plans for FOSI retirement--see below. The news
> came to me on Friday in "(Updated) - 2014 Arbortext Announcements" in my
> daily "PTC Technical Support Subscriptions" email
>
>
>
> The announcement below says they will continue to include the FOSI
> composition engine in future releases, but will no longer have any
> maintenance releases or patches related to it.
>
>
>
> So, I'm wondering, Should we start migrating our FOSI style sheets to
> Styler or should we continue to put all our eggs in the FOSI basket since
> the composition engine that works for us now will be available with future
> Arbortext products?
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> 2014 Arbortext Announcements
>
>
>
> July 2015: FOSI Retirement Notice
>
> · Beginning July 1, 2015, PTC will change the level of support
> for the FOSI composition engine from Standard to Sustained.
>
> · This includes the use of XSL-FO, the FOSI Editor and the
> Arbortext line numbering application.
>
> · Customers with an active Global Support agreement may continue
> contact PTC Technical Support as well as have continued access to technical
> support web tools, the knowledgebase and prior maintenance releases.
>
> · However, there will be no additional maintenance releases or
> patches related to the FOSI composition engine.
>
> · The FOSI composition engine will continue to be included in the
> Arbortext suite of products, and customers may continue to use existing
> FOSI stylesheets.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --Jack
>
> LSI, Inc.
>
> Jacksonville, FL

jsillari

1-Visitor

"Surprise, surprise, surprise!"

John Sillari
Chief Technologist
Technical Services Division
Dayton T. Brown, Inc.

On Dec 8, 2014, at 11:51, "Paul Nagai" <-<<a style="COLOR:" blue;=" text-decoration:=" underline"=" target="_BLANK" href="mailto:-">>">mailto:->> wrote:

My 12/5 PTC Technical Support Subscriptions email did not include this notice.

And: Gah!

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 9:42 AM, Kulas, Jack <-<<a style="COLOR:" blue;=" text-decoration:=" underline"=" target="_BLANK" href="mailto:-">>">mailto:->> wrote:
I just read about PTC’s plans for FOSI retirement—see below. The news came to me on Friday in “(Updated) - 2014 Arbortext Announcements” in my daily “PTC Technical Support Subscriptions” email

The announcement below says they will continue to include the FOSI composition engine in future releases, but will no longer have any maintenance releases or patches related to it.

So, I’m wondering, Should we start migrating our FOSI style sheets to Styler or should we continue to put all our eggs in the FOSI basket since the composition engine that works for us now will be available with future Arbortext products?

2014 Arbortext Announcements

July 2015: FOSI Retirement Notice

•         Beginning July 1, 2015, PTC will change the level of support for the FOSI composition engine from Standard to Sustained.

•         This includes the use of XSL-FO, the FOSI Editor and the Arbortext line numbering application.

•         Customers with an active Global Support agreement may continue contact PTC Technical Support as well as have continued access to technical support web tools, the knowledgebase and prior maintenance releases.

•         However, there will be no additional maintenance releases or patches related to the FOSI composition engine.

•         The FOSI composition engine will continue to be included in the Arbortext suite of products, and customers may continue to use existing FOSI stylesheets.

--Jack
LSI, Inc.
Jacksonville, FL
----------

GarethOakes

16-Pearl

We had heard rumours of this. Here is a link for anyone who hasn’t received the notice yet:

SarahPrice

10-Marble

So I read the notice and my question is how long will it before they stop remove it completely? Should we start looking at Styler or Print Publisher?

Any insight would be appreciated.

Sarah R. Price
Developer
Enterprise Information Services, Inc.
USCG ISD Bldg 63 ALC
Elizabeth City NC 27909

JeffStevenson

1-Visitor

While PTC will no longer be actively developing FOSI, it doesn't benefit them to remove it just yet. There are still a lot of companies and government bodies that have FOSI as the standard. It would be difficult for them to move away from FOSI too quickly for cost and logistical reasons.

LynnHales

1-Visitor

Logic is not a key trait to MBA’s concerned only with the bottom line. PTC has continually shown their disdain for Epic to the point I am not sure why they bought it in the first place.

I am glad I am getting close to retiring. Between the BS at CSC, with our contractor, and now this; it may be time to stop (or go part time somewhere).

Lynn

GarethOakes

16-Pearl

Hi Sarah,

This is a good point. Personally speaking, I don’t think FOSI will be removed from Arbortext in the short- nor medium term. Remember that FOSI is deeply embedded in Arbortext for styling of markup for screen display. However as you say it never hurts to think of the future. Especially as deprecation of FOSI also affects the Arbortext XSL-FO support.

I’m interested in what options yourself and the Arbortext community are considering? Most of our clients are off of FOSI now, and we tend to use a mix of technologies depending on the circumstance: XSL-FO (non-Arbortext), APP (if complex), Styler (if DITA), and our “secret sauce” CompML (best blend of power vs usability, think XSL-FO for APP).

// Gareth Oakes
// Chief Architect, GPSL
// www.gpsl.co

ptc-953422

Author

1-Visitor

Gareth,

Until last week my group had never seriously contemplated converting our huge FOSI, developed over 10 years, to Styler. We’ve always been able to do whatever print/PDF styling we needed using FOSI, thanks to a lot of help from the exceptionally amazing Adepters community and from Editor Help. And it seemed FOSI would go on forever, like COBOL ☺

But even though PTC says it will continue to provide the FOSI composition engine in future Arbortext products, it seems now to be prudent to explore conversion, given PTC’s track record with Arbortext products. I’m not the only one who thinks PTC could pull the plug on FOSI at any time, whenever they want, am I?

I’ve started to consider conversion, but already run into a number of obstacles and questions.

My first foray at conversion using the Editor 6.1 menu option Styler --> Convert Stylesheet… ended in immediate error message: “[A19348] fosi2styler: invalid or incomplete FOSI stylesheet.” When I looked at incompatibilities of FOSI with Styler, the list contained many FOSI features we use often, e.g., boxing , chgmark, floats and floatloc, fillval, highlt, test values (specval) that use #FOSI, system-var, etc. See Help 5803, Help 5808.

And not having a copy of the “full version” of Styler seems to be a serious limitation to exploring conversion. We only have the free version packaged with Editor, which is for editor-window formatting only, not print formatting. I just got a quote from our reseller for the full version: $6700 less a $700 (?) discount. Does it make sense for us now to pony up $6K to begin the conversion-development effort? [And it does seem that it would be a significant development effort, given our FOSI with over 500 EICs, 40 pagesets, over 4000 att-clauses, etc., etc.] I’m wondering what sort of PTC help or guidance would be available for conversion if we did get the full version. Would the only alternative be high-priced PTC consultation?

And one last question, about publishing Styler-styled documents. Can Print Composer be used for that, or does one need to step up to the next level of PE or APP?

The easy thing now is just to Stay Calm and Carry On with FOSI. But it’s hard not to be at least a little worried about what PTC might do next.

--Jack
LSI, Inc
Jacksonville, FL

ptc-953343

1-Visitor

Some time ago I looked at converting a fairly basic Fosi with styler and ran into the same issues of some very basic functions not being supported in Styler.

I don't know if the basic composition engine changed when Styler was added
I thought it was a new guitar for doing style sheet development that when developed in Styler, you could output to Fosi or xsl. Maybe that evolved overtime.

What do it mean to stop support for Fosi engine? Seems to me that unless app is being brought in as the core engine that Fosi will still be supported but what you can't expect are new features or extensions to the language. Or does Fosi engine equate to print composer? I think the full version of Styler was the replacement for that product on a standalone machine at least.

If you have to switch to xsl then there are other options for composition tools that are better supported and are the companies primary products. See renderx or antenna house for example. So the real problem I think is in the conversion cost from Fosi to xsl. Long run converting to a more universal standard is a good thing although painful. For DoD contracts that specify Fosi you have the additional pain of educating the customer about the change and getting the approval and funding to change.

Sent on a Sprint Samsung Galaxy Note® II

GregoryMackenzi

1-Visitor

If your considering converting a FOSI, you may well want to check out the PTC Styler Documentation, here’s an excerpt:

Converting a FOSI to a StylerSheet
Arbortext Styler provides a conversion utility that partially converts a FOSI to a
StylerSheet. Before converting a FOSI, refer to the following limitations of the
conversion program.
Limitations of converting FOSIs to StylerSheets
The FOSI to Arbortext Styler conversion process does not convert the following
FOSI features because Arbortext Styler does not provide corresponding capabilities:
Borders
Boxing
Change marks (chgmark)
Conditional post space (postsp:condit)
Element-in-contexts whose gitype is pi.
Environment (envdesc)
Floats and float locations (floatloc)
Font width (font:width)
Footnote description (ftndesc)
Highlighting (highlt), score weight (scorewt), score offset (scoreoff), and
foreground percent (forpct)
Hyphenation rule (hyphrule) characteristics other than language
Hyphenation zones (hyphen:zone)
Keep floats out (keeps:floatsout)
L-page column spans (span:pageflow)
Run-in titles
Security description (secdesc)
Sentence spacing (sentxsp)
Word spacing (wordsp)
Use values (fillval)
Test values (specval) that use #FOSI, system-var (other than editor-only,
print-only, html-only), system-func or the use of a textid in the
attval characteristic

The following generated text FOSI features are not converted during the conversion
process, but Arbortext Styler provides corresponding capabilities. Once you have
converted your FOSI, you can duplicate the formatting of these features using the
Gentext properties tab in Arbortext Styler:
Character fills (charfill)
Counters, reset, and enumerate (enumerat)
Generated graphics (putgraph)
Rules (ruling)
Run-in titles
Saved text (savetext)
Use text (usetext)
listitem gentext is converted to bullets, and indentation may need to be modified

Gregory B. MacKenzie, B.F.A.
Programmer II
L-3 Electronic System Services (L-3 ESS)
249 Aerotech Park Drive
Box 960 Enfield Postal Station
Enfield Nova Scotia, Canada, B2T 1K9

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