Transferring a document into Frame

[Fred Ridder]

At my last employer, I imported some 10k pages of Word documentation into FrameMaker. The thing that made this workable was that the Word documents all had to conform to a specific template (almost a schema) so that they could be converted to Winhelp files with minimum human intervention. If your Word docs consistently use a common template, the conversion to FrameMaker can be relatively painless. But importing PDF will *always* be an issue because PDF never contains any information regarding the paragraph tags--it only deals with the formatting specifications that were applied to the text.
 
What I found to be by *far* the best approach is to import Word files into FrameMaker template files that have an identically named set of paragraph styles. If you want to keep the Word style names, just set up a FrameMaker template that duplicates the names with whatever formatting you want the style names to produce. If you want to use a different set of style names, the best approach is to use Word macros to rename the Word styles to match the FrameMaker template. Once you have two docs with the same style names, use File>Import>File to import the Word content into the FrameMaker template, using the option to reformat the content according to the FrameMaker file. This leaves behind the maximum amount of Word-specific properties, peculiarities, and idiosyncracies. In my experience, this approach works *much* better than using File>Open.
 
But if your Word document uses hundreds of locally formatted Normal paragraphs (and we've all had to deal with those), you'll have to manually apply tags just as in the PDF case.
 
-Fred Ridder
 



From: SamTomanio at aol.com
Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2012 06:28:33 -0400
Subject: Transferring a document into Frame
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com



Hello fellow Framers
 
Does anyone have some tips for transferring a document into Frame. For instance, I frequently have to take either a Word or PDF document and transfer it into Frame. I use the "Paste Special" command so all the text is editable but it's very time consuming having to go back and re assign paragraph tags.
 
Thank You!
 
Sam Tomanio
US Airways   
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