"MIF"ed Newbie

[Steve Cavanaugh]

I started using FrameMaker 7.2 fairly recently.  I was fortunate to beg
a template off an experienced user, saving me many hours of setup for
the document I'm writing.  I've been reading the list for about six
weeks, and numerous times I've seen instructions to save to MIF, do some
editing, then read back into Frame. Good, I'm not afraid of that, and
looking at a MIF file it seems a great way to get at things.

I've been battling fonts here, and after a number of aborted efforts to
convert my activities to Helvetica, I decided that Arial would be fine,
and after all, it is available on every Windows machine.  Anyone can
maintain it with Arial.  I reasoned that the easiest way to do this
would be to save all of the files in my book to MIF and use
Search/Replace to get things converted.  That way I wouldn't have to go
looking under all the rocks in Frame to find all of the Font
definitions.  So I created a MIF folder and saved the entire book (about
36 files) to MIF format.  

The Search/Replace went smoothly, and when I read the files back in I
was pleased to see the Font change was in place.  Good.  

One thing that I didn't really pay enough attention to though - when I
opened the first file, Frame complained about Unresolved
Cross-References.  Well we see that a lot, don't we.  I ignored it for
the moment and began adding value to the book.  But I kept seeing this
on all of the files, so I decided to resolve them yesterday.  What I
discovered was very upsetting - all of the cross-references embedded on
the master pages of each file were now pointing to the MIF folder, which
I had sumarily dismissed after finishing with it.  All thirty-six files,
with about five to seven master pages each, three cross-references per
page.  OUCH!  I just finished about 6 hours of re-establishing all of
those cross-references.  

So, I'm not sure where I went wrong.  I had named all of the MIF files
as filename.fm.mif which allowed me to easily revert to saving as .fm
when I was ready to re-save.  If Frame has a habit of doing this kind of
thing, I'm not sure I can use MIF again - is there a way to prevent
Frame from changing the cross-references when saving as MIF and then
re-saving as .fm?  Anyone see where I went wrong?  

Steve Cavanaugh