single-sourcing PDF and "text with layout"?

Robert Lauriston robert at lauriston.com
Tue Feb 21 12:45:24 PST 2012


I've inherited a couple of docs in FrameMaker that have for some years
been delivered in both PDF and plain text and am obliged to continue
doing that.

As far as I can see from the source, working directories, and so on,
the PDF was generated from FrameMaker, and the text version was
maintained by making the same changes twice.

Any suggestions on single-sourcing the text output? People are used to
the text being pretty readable, with headings in caps, indents using
leading spaces, bullets using "o," and so on, so FM's native save as
text is not acceptable.

Best solution I've found so far is MIF2Go > RTF > Word > Save As >
Text with Layout (*.ans). That's kludgy but close enough that I could
probably make it work by tweaking the FM template and/or MIF2Go
options and maybe doing some post-processing with a script.

Acrobat's save as Accessible Text also seems promising but not as
close to what I need as the above.

Once upon a time there was FM2A for precisely this sort of task.
What's the latest version of FM it will work with?
http://www.fsatools.com/oldies.html

Any other suggestions?



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