Yoicks! Need to clean up very crufty Frame files

[Andy Lewis]

Hi Tori,

Don't panic! There are a number of excellent FrameMaker plug-ins that can
help you automate much of the process, such as TemplateMapper by CudSpan
(for which we are an official reseller), Clean Import by EZTools, and
ImportFormatsSpecial by Rick Quatro at Carmen Publishing. All offer slightly
different functionality, so you'll need to assess exactly what it is you are
aiming for.

FrameScript may also be useful to you.

My company iG5 Authoring Tools also specializes in this kind of work, so
feel free to contact me offline for a chat about what you need.

Best wishes,
Andy Lewis

iG5 Authoring Tools
+972 54 4605708
www.ig5authoringtools.com

LinkedIn http://il.linkedin.com/in/andylewis2003
Twitter http://twitter.com/andytelaviv


-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Tori Muir
Sent: Sunday, October 24, 2010 10:53 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Yoicks! Need to clean up very crufty Frame files

Just inherited a set of manuals that have 238 (yes, I really did count 
them) paragraph formats. Let's not even go there on character formats, 
cross-ref formats, and etc. In 20+ years of working with Frame I have 
never seen anything like this.

These are ~100-page manuals, so as far as I can tell most of the styles 
are not used, just accumulation from years and years and years of one 
person iteratively adapting a single template, just adding new stuff 
whenever she felt it was needed.

How on earth can these books be cleaned up without losing things like 
cross refs and index markers? I have clean, well-built templates the 
info could be moved into, but how to do that while keeping the template 
clean? Would the best solution be just bite the bullet and blow 
everything out to plain text and start over?

-- 
Tori Muir
tmuir at spot-on-creative.com . 650.430.8674
www.spot-on-creative.com 

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