FM8: Converting Asian FM7 files to Unicode

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

I wanted to study FM8 Unicode capabilities, so I tried to
convert three Asian non-Unicode FM7 files to FM8 Unicode.
It hasn't worked out very well.

First I tried simply opening the files in FM8.  After
accepting the "conversion", I saved the Chinese file as
FM8 MIF and looked at the text.  It was still GB2312,
like the FM7 file, not Unicode.  Oops.

I found that I could export to XML, then re-import the XML, 
and get Unicode UTF-8.  But then all formatting was gone.
Not a very good solution.

Then I tried creating a new FM8 file, adding one line of
text, and using File | Import | File by Copying the Chinese
nominally-FM8 MIF.  It worked!  Nice Unicode MIF resulted,
and Mif2Go made perfectly good Chinese HTML from it.

So I repeated the import with the Japanese file.  No go.
Still ShiftJIS after the import and re-save as MIF.  The
same thing happened with the Korean file, no Unicode,
still KSC5601.  Oddly, the Chinese MIF file claimed to be
using GB2312 in its para catalog, but it wasn't, as a hex 
dump established...

There must be some simple step I'm missing here.  After
all, the FM8 online help says you can:
  Convert and import text of non-Unicode encodings such as
  FrameRoman, JISX0208.ShiftJIS, BIG5, GB2312-80.EUC, and
  KSC5601-1992, which were supported in earlier versions of
  FrameMaker.

But that only worked for GB2312, not for the other two.
Anyone have any ideas?  Has anyone actually managed to 
convert an existing FM7 Asian doc to FM8 Unicode?


-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/