AW: FM 7.2 <> 6.0

[Steve Rickaby]

> At 15:08 -0400 24/7/06, Art Campbell wrote:
>
> >Hmmm. I'd been told that if you saved as .mif, the 7/later
> features would
> >remain intact, but would just be ignored by the 6/earlier
> parser. So that if you re-opened the file in 7, you wouldn't
> lose anything.

At 13:10 +0200 25/7/06, Reng, Winfried wrote:

>FM 7.1/2 (and I think also 7.0) has 12 Running H/F variables
>compared to 2 in FM 6. I think these excess system variables
>become user variables in FM 6. I don't know what will happen
>with them when you return to 7.2.

Yes, good point - I'd forgotten that. Actually, FrameMaker 6 and before had 4 H/F variables.

A simple test reveals that a document that uses Running H/F 5-12, when saved out to MIF, imported into FrameMaker 6, saved back to MIF and re-opened in FrameMaker 7 *does* indeed preserve the value of Running H/F 5 across the process, although of course in 6 the variables do not display correctly (they actually display part of the variable's format definition).

Phil Heron suggested features listed under compatibility in the MIF on-line guide. I looked at XMP job control data, and found that FrameMaker 6 drops the <DocFileInfo> block, as the MIF guide suggests.

So I guess the answer is 'it all depends'.

-- 
Steve