Coverting Word docs to Structured Framemaker

[l_c_smalley at yahoo.com]

Tracy,

At my previous job, I was heavily involved in exactly this type of work for a variety of clients.  This included designing templates, conversion tables and even developing custom tools (using FrameMaker's Development Kit [FDK]) to automate repative tasks.  Our firm processed hundreds of thousands of pages from Word to structured Frame and generated richly linked (TOCs and cross-references) SGML, XML and PDF as outputs.

The short answer is yes, the process is essentially the same after importing the Word file into FrameMaker, as that converts the Word source to an unstructured FM document.

The biggest caveat is that the Word documents should use well-defined styles consistently rather than the all too frequent practice of ad-hoc formatting (just because it looks like a Heading 1 does not mean it it really tagged as a Heading 1), so cleanup is essential,
 either in Word (via macros perhaps) or in Frame (custom FDK tools, FrameScript, etc) and even in both applications before applying a conversion table to get the greatest success.

– Les 

--- On Tue, 5/5/09, Gill, Tracy <Tracy.Gill at airnz.co.nz> wrote:
Hi All,

Has anyone any expertise in converting word docs to structured framemaker.  I have done a lot of converting unstructured frame to structured frame using the conversion table and wondered whether I would use the same process for word documents?

 Thanks

Tracy