Framemaker to Apple's Pages

[david]

At 12.22 -0800 05-12-14, Jeremy H. Griffith 
wrote/05-12-14, 12.22 -0800 skrev Jeremy H. 
Griffith

>It would be good to find out, empirically!  Mif2Go's RTF export
>is substantially better than Frame's native RTF.  But we haven't
>tried it with Pages.  You can download a free demo (Win only):
>   http://www.omsys.com/dcl/download.htm
>
>If you find any problems with importing the resulting RTF to
>Pages, please let us know, and we'll work them out.  Note
>though that you'll need to run Mif2Go with a Windows version
>of Frame, either on a Windows box or under VPC on the Mac.
>
>We'd love to offer a Mac version, but so far no-one with the
>required Mac FDK and C++ porting experience has been willing
>to take the task on...  We can offer shared royalties on the
>result, or agree to make the Mac version free (our preference),
>but we cannot offer the $100K+ that would be needed to pay for
>this port.  If anyone on the lists is interested, let us know!

Since Pages uses a documented XML-format as its 
native document format, wouldn't it make more 
sense to use Framemaker's XML-export and use some 
kind of XML-transformation to convert to/from 
Pages? I don't know enough about XML but my 
understanding was that XML is quite easy to 
convert back and forth using XSLT?

I guess there should be some demand for a product 
that could perform such a transformation between 
Pages and Framemaker, shouldn't it?

At 14.58 -0800 05-12-14, Pat Christenson 
wrote/05-12-14, 14.58 -0800 skrev Pat Christenson
>I don't know about transferring FM docs to Pages 
>but I had the misfortune of working with Pages 
>several months ago. I'm pretty sure I posted 
>(ranted) about it here. In a nutshell, I felt 
>that Pages was a toy. Good enough for writing 
>the Christmas letter and that's about it.

Currently, that is what I want to use Pages for 
(actually business letters, CV:s and similar 
short documents but they shouldn't be more 
demanding that »Christmas letters»). I used to 
use FM for all my writing, from short letters to 
theses, but it feels like a lot of overhead to 
start classic to write a 10 lines letter....

>Not at all ready to compete as a publishing 
>tool. For instance, we were unable to create a 
>PDF other than with Apple's Print as PDF command 
>which didn't make our printer happy at all.

I haven't had that problem, printing to Adobe PDF 
7.0 has always worked fine for me. On the other 
hand, my documents haven't been that 'heavy' or 
complicated (c.f., previous paragraph).


At 15.37 +0000 05-12-14, Paul Findon 
wrote/05-12-14, 15.37 +0000 skrev Paul Findon
>That's what I thought. But it wasn't an option 
>when I checked. However, like Apple, I use 
>FrameMaker 6.0. Just checked FrameMaker 7.0 and, 
>sure enough, Word is a save-as option. So, yes, 
>FrameMaker->Word->Pages is another route. As you 
>say, it should retain more info, but I've read 
>some unfavorable reports about Pages' Word 
>import/export ability on Apple's forums, so your 
>milage may vary.

I just checked and I can't find that option, or 
can I? I have Word 6.0 for Mac or Word 6-7 for 
Windows as options in the Save as... dialog but 
if I save a Framemaker document in any of those 
format with a .doc-extension Pages refuses to 
open it. However MacWord reads them. Another, 
slightly more complicated document, that origins 
from Word is opened by Pages without any problem.

Maybe Framemaker introduces something 
non-standard when it exports to .doc that Word 
accepts but Pages don't understand?



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