Converting Word doc to Frame

[Ridder, Fred]

Jeez, now you're going to test my memory, because most of
the conversion work I did was more than five years ago when 
I migrated our pubs group from Word to FrameMaker as our 
standard tool.

Our docs were all in Word 95, which meant the macros were
written in Word Basic rather than Visual Basic for Applications,
which I am much less familiar with. I had a flock of separate 
small macros that each did relatively simple operations like:
- removing manual page breaks
- removing empty paragraphs 
- searching for paragraph styles that were not part of the 
standard template 
- searching for manually applied character formatting (i.e.
not using our template's defined character styles)
- removing all autonumbering (done by SEQ codes in Word)
- dealing with annotations, hidden text, and other background
content
- replacing linked graphics with placeholders that identified 
the source file
- removing irrelevant field codes (including *lots* of empty 
index entry fields)
- deleting the Word TOC, LOT, LOF, and index

Then I had a couple of more complex macros that did things
like renaming all the Word styles to the new names that were 
defined in the FrameMaker templates, and converting some
of the "fancy" stuff we had done on our API reference pages
from the Word implementation to a FrameMaker way of doing
things.  The final macro burst the monolithic Word docs into 
a series of separate files on chapter boundaries. 

The end result was a set of small, clean files that could
be imported into the FrameMaker templates with a minimum
of muss and fuss.  

My opinions only; I don't speak for Intel.
Fred Ridder (fred dot ridder at intel dot com)
Intel
Parsippany, NJ



-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces+fred.ridder=intel.com at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces+fred.ridder=intel.com at lists.frameusers.com] On
Behalf Of Anne Robotti
Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006 9:13 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: Converting Word doc to Frame

> I've converted thousands of pages using only Word (with macros
> to do a bunch of clean-up pre conversion) and FrameMaker. 

Fred, could you elaborate on these macros? What do they do, and how do
they work?

Thanks,

Anne