Crashes when using FM drawings and saving to XML (DITA)

Question

We're having a strange problem with FM 8.0p273 and DITA concerning FM-internal graphics. We would like to create some of our images using the FM drawing tools, so we insert a <fig> element and draw a graphics frame into the <image>'s anchored frame into which we draw our graphics. If we try to save the topic to XML, FM crashes with the message "Internal error 8004, 6343724, 8484240, 0. FrameMaker has detected a serious problem and must quit. [...]".
Now, the default R/W-rules for DITA topics only contain a "writer facet default" rule which apparently applies only to <image> elements with exactly one facet. However, the Structured Application Developers Guide states:
"However, if the author used FrameMaker graphic tools to create the objects in the graphic element, you want the file written in QuickDraw PICT format. To accomplish all this, use the following rule:
element "graphic" {
is fm graphic element;
writer anchored frame export to file "$(docname).pic" as "PICT";
I tried this rule (with the correct element name, of course...), but it makes no difference; FM still crashes with the same error message.
Does anyone experience the same error, or may this be some kind of misconfiguration in the R/W-rules?

Answer 1

Marcus,
When a facet is a referenced external entity, ie. external graphic file, the default behaviour of frame depends on the dtd. If DTD defines attribute "entity", the reference is written out to XML as local entity declaration and entity attribute points to that. If the DTD has file attribute, or as in case of dita, href, Frame writes the external entity reference as an attribute value and no local declaration gets generated.
Internally frame handles external graphic files as entities, as stated in the dev guide.
Now, in case where you create a drawing in frame, no external entity exists, so frame has to create the local entity declaration and write the external graphic to file and point to it.
Since frame converts all the stuff in an anchored frame with drawing elements to single graphic entity.
So, I did a small test..I modified my topic DTD to support entity approach instead of href, made a small topic in frame with simple drawing (just on straight line). XML looks like (tag marks removed..):
?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?
!DOCTYPE topic PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Topic//EN" "topic.dtd" [
!-- Begin Document Specific Declarations --
!NOTATION cgm SYSTEM ""
!ENTITY fmimage1 SYSTEM "fmimage11.cgm" NDATA cgm
<!-- End Document Specific Declarations -->
and reference to local entity:
fmimage entity = "fmimage1" fmheight = "1.575in" fmwidth = "5.276in"
fmalign = "aleft" angle = "0.000" cropped = "0" float = "0"
nsoffset = "0.000in" position = "below"
( I use a specialization in DITA to capture all aspects of a frame anchor and graphics)
Now, there is no difference and frame cannot know, where the cgm came from (was it a frame drawing or just an cgm graphics file), pointing mechanism is different, but XML parser resolves the local entities anyway, so at the end it's just a file pointer. Well, at least in case of cgm, frame seems to know, when reading back, frame generates two facets the CGM and FrameVector. I don't know what would happen if other format than cgm is used.
Martti