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