Pagemaker to FrameMaker conversion

[Alan Litchfield]

Carol J. Elkins wrote:
>
> 1. Has anyone successfully converted from PageMaker to FrameMaker and, if
> so, what were the gotchas?

Reasonably successful, FM can import PM files directly. But...

1. Provided the original document uses properly formatted text and everything
is in one flow, otherwise some text can be lost.

2. Image data can be quite challenging, depending on your platform, and
whether you are swapping platforms at the same time.

3. Tabular data that has been created using Adobe Table is a real pain.

To get around the problems in 1-3 above I PDFd the original documents. This
gave me something to compare once the translation has been done. Vector art
images were extracted from the PDF using Illustrator. Raster images need to be
treateed on a case by case basis depending on the original file format, but
mostly I was able to select the image data from the PDF in Acrobat and paste
that into Photoshop. Tabular data can be copied from the PDF or exported as
TXT (real drag if there are a lot of tables).

If the originator was undisciplined you might find a lot of strange formats
that are brought into FM, or worse, Word formats. To fix these I have used
Paragraph Tools and Character Tools. Then gone back through them all and
assigned correct formats. Obviously this meant creating a template first and
importing the page, paragraph, character, etc. styles into each converted
chapter before tryin gto clean it all up.

There is a lot of work in the worst case, but can be straightforward if the
originator knew what they were doing.

> 2. Can anyone recommend a translation vendor who could manage this conversion?
>
>

No, sorry. I can do conversion but not translation.

Cheers
Alan Litchfield