Structured FrameMaker and MS Word XML Import

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Thu, 3 Aug 2006 15:00:20 -0700, "David Versdahl" <ved at cypress.com> wrote:

>We are embarking on a new project with a new 1200 page book. There are two
>audiences for this book. One is a subset of the other. The request is that
>we base this book on a single MS Word document that is maintained by one or
>engineers at different sites. 

That's asking for trouble.  Word is simply incapable of handling
complex 1200-page documents, or even simple 1000-page documents.
It's in enough trouble with simple 300-page documents...  ;-)

>The content is constantly changing with the
>addition of new material and the excising of outdated information. The
>preference is to keep this a FrameMaker document so, we would take this Word
>document and import it in some fashion into FrameMaker. The traditional
>import function is impractical and tedious in this instance.

Consider turning the problem around.  Get the original material
into FrameMaker, preferably as a book consisting of perhaps eight
chapter files, whatever fits the doc structure.  Then you can
readily generate a single PDF.  When you need to furnish it to
the engineers in Word, use Mif2Go to produce the Word doc; many
members of this list do that, and we don't know of a better way
(truly, even if it is our product ;-).  You will get a set of
Word docs, not just one (one per chapter file), but that's what
you need if anyone wants to edit it in Word.  And you can force
Track Changes on, so you can easily see what was altered and
copy/paste it (as PLAIN TEXT) back into the FrameMaker doc.
That way, your writer maintains control of doc integrity, which
we consider very important.  You don't want any old tweak made
by a reviewer to go into the master FrameMaker doc without any
authorial review, now do you?  <bg>

HTH!

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/