Word to Frame

[Fred Ridder]

Responding to Gillian Flato, Mike Feimster wrote:
> What I've done in the past is use word macros to make the para styles in
> Word match the Frame styles, then import the word docs into Frame.
 
 
That's exactly the same approach I used in converting ~10k pages of Word
docs (>50 docs) into FrameMaker at a previous employer. 
 
Just to amplify on a few points, though:
 
You really want to use File>Import>File (Copy Into Document) to pull the 
Word content into a pre-formatted FrameMaker template rather than 
directly opening the Word file from the FrameMaker File menu. Besides 
the fact that the import filter somehow seems more robust in that mode, 
you also have the opportunity to leave behind most of Word-specific 
formatting junk by choosing the "Reformat Using Current Document's 
Formatting" option in the Import Text Flow by Copy dialog.
 
In the same macro that you use to rename the Word paragraph styles,
you should also redefine any styles that use bullets or numbering to
remove them. If bullets or autonumbers are present in the Word file,
FrameMaker does its best to preserve them and you'll get garbage 
characters in the converted file.
 
Other useful operations in prepping the Word file are to remove any
TOC, LOT, LOF, and index (since FrameMaker handles them completely 
differently), strip any headers and footers (these will be defined in 
your FrameMaker template) and remove any section breaks (meaningless
in Frame). In my own process, I also removed all graphics from the 
Word file because they really slowed the conversion down and I knew
we were going to replace the pasted-in images with anchored frames 
and referenced graphics post-conversion.
 
-Fred Ridder
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