Wild stab in the dark: LaTeX to MIF

[Peter Ring]

I gather you do not run a Unix box, but both Mac OSX and Windows come 
close enough. I can't help with Mac OSX, but I'm willing to try 
compiling those utilities for Cygwin (a *nix environment on top of 
Windows) -- if you tell a bit more about what you intend to use it for.

Up-conversion of legacy documentation? One-time or continuously? Why 
involve FrameMaker at all? Would it be easier if you reversed the 
process, or introduced another exchange/storage format?

For some specialized purposes, going for an XML exchange/storage format 
might be more attractive. E.g. for reference documentation traditionally 
produced from nroff/troff/groff with the 'man' macro package, DocBook 
XML might be a good exchange format.
   man pages can readily be produced from DocBook XML 'refentry', there 
is a number of utilities that extract embedded source code documentation 
and emit DocBook refentry, and DocBook XML can be typeset in a number of 
ways -- including FrameMaker.

LaTeX is based on TeX, which can be considered a programming language 
(it is Turing-complete). This implies that you actually need TeX to 
'translate' arbitrary LaTeX documents into something else. In principle, 
the best way to translate LaTeX to FrameMaker would be a TeX compiler 
that produces MIF output rather than DVI. MicroPress' TeXpider [1] works 
this way to produce HTML from pretty much arbitrary TeX.
   But most converters assume that your LaTeX documents is plain and 
simple, i.e. can be interpreted by a mock interpreter. A number of 
TeX-to-something converters are listed here [2][3].

kind regards
Peter Ring

[1] http://www.micropress-inc.com/webb/wbstart.htm
[2] http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=fmtconv
[3] http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html

Steve Rickaby wrote:
> Without having thoroughly thought it through, it seems possible in principle to construct a LaTeX to MIF filter using a default template. Does anyone know if this has ever been tried? Sources?
> 
> I have found MIF to LaTeX and LaTeX to MML here:
> 
> <http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/software/framemaker/>
> 
> The Athena site at MIT seems to have cracked this, but using proprietary apps running in a Unix command line and going via MML:
> 
> % la2mml filename1.tex | mmltomif > filename2.mif
>