MIF to SVG

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Tue, 7 Dec 2010 20:27:30 +0100, Michael Müller-Hillebrand 
<mmh at cap-studio.de> wrote:

>I have done some work in this direction, both using FrameScript 
>from "inside" FrameMaker documents as well as externally after 
>turning FrameMaker files with Leximation’s MIFML converter in 
>to MIF-as-XML. I then used XSLT to create SVG.

An interesting approach!  We just used C++, converting the
Frame graphics into a DCL representation, then generating
WMF from the DCL.  (We created DCL and made it public domain.)

So for SVG, we already have the MIF parsed, and have the WMF 
code we wrote as a framework.

>But: SVG has no real support for text frames, just text lines. 

Same for WMF.  However, Frame does tell you where line breaks
are in the text frames, so our code computes the start for
each line.  Of course this also requires parsing the Frame
para and char formats, to determine size and spacing, so it 
is nontrivial.  Hard to see how you could do it with XSLT.

>Also, as far as I remember, I stopped creating a converter 
>for Arc objects, because the graphic model is very different 
>between FrameMaker (where you can rotate any object as you 
>like) and SVG.

Yes, WMF is also more limited.  So we had to compute the
equivalent polylines for many Frame objects, and since WMF
has no grouping, such objects are essentially uneditable
thereafter.  (Some line segments were only one pixel long.)

We also ran into issues with rotated text, dotted lines,
line weights, and much more.  The results were "good enough"
for use as WinHelp illustrations, but would not win prizes.

>So, yes, it is possible with some limitations.

Some pretty severe ones, IMHO... which is another reason
we haven't rushed to do it.

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