Old Pagemaker Files

[Alan Litchfield]

On May 9, 2006, at 4:00 PM, Don and Judy wrote:

> Hi, gang!
>
> Anyone ever found a way to convert old Mac OS PageMaker files into FM?
>
> ~

Actually doing a job involving that now. Open the files in FM and  
import them. You will be given a range of versions to import with. It  
is best to have a template you have already prepared beforehand to  
import into the new FM files. When you have imported the PM files,  
import the template formats to try and rid yourself of any anomalies  
that were brought in. Hopefully the orginator used stylesheets, if so  
you can use the Paragraph Tools and Character Tools plugins to  
replace any PM style names with the FM ones.

Likely problems will be text boxes that are not part of the main text  
flow, images and tables that were drawn using Adobe Table (ugh).

I PDF'd the PM files and copied and pasted missing text. As for  
images, well there is no one way if they were embedded. Some images  
can be extracted from PM directly by copying and pasting into  
Photoshop (for example line art and greyscale scans). Other images  
(in particular vector eps images) could only be sucked out once the  
PM files had been printed as PDFs, and then opened in Illustrator,  
the extra page bits deleted and then saving the file as an eps.

Tables proved to be especially troublesome, the only real solution,  
to save a whole lot of time (around 300 tables), was to select the  
table in PM and drag and drop it into Illustrator. Then the resulting  
table was saved as an eps image. Not satisfactory, but workable until  
the tabular data needs to be changed, progressively.

If you are opening them on Windows, just make certain they have the  
right suffix for the version of PM.

Saving an exported PDF as RTF was an option, but it meant that all  
the styles were lost and a whole bunch of ancillary junk was added  
(headers, footers, etc.). The result meant more work than by doing  
the above, which still meant a lot of work.

Alan