Identifying the type of imported by copy files

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Tue, 6 Jun 2006 10:44:23 +0100, Steve Rickaby 
<srickaby at wordmongers.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>A friend has a FrameMaker file prepared on PC with figures 
>imported by copy that show up as gray boxes when viewed on 
>Mac - so no surprises there. Examination of the MIF shows 
>that they are bitmaps. Is there any way to identify the 
>embedded image types from the MIF?
>
>The bitmaps in the MIF are all prefixed by: 
>
>=OLE2

You're hosed.  OLE is a Windows-only technology.  Basically,
what is stored is not a bitmap, but a binary mini-filesystem
in Microsoft's proprietary (and undocumented) Structured
Storage format.  The "files" in there contain the info that
the original application that created the graphic needs to
edit it, so in that sense the data is self-contained.  For
editing you need the application, but for view and print
you do not, because one of the "files" is a WMF (metafile)
that can be used for display... in Windows only.  ;-)

When we ran into this in Mif2Go, we reverse-engineered the
MS format, and found a way to dig out that WMF.  However,
there is often more than one WMF, and identifying the right
one to uses as the display image is tricky... and not always
possible.  So Mif2Go has an option that puts out *all* the
WMFs in an OLE object as individual files, allowing you to
choose the right one, if its "best guess" wasn't it.

So you could use Mif2Go, on Windows, to extract the WMFs
for your graphics... but WMFs are not viewable on the Mac.
The next best choice would be to have Mif2Go use Frame's
graphics export filters, in Windows, to produce bitmaps
that *are* usable on Mac, like JPEGs.  That would not
require that you have the original application that was
used to create the graphics; Frame and Mif2Go are enough.

HTH!

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