Confluence 4 export: the one feature that would justify my upgrading from FM10

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

On Mon, 19 Nov 2012 09:56:33 -0800, Robert Lauriston 
<robert at lauriston.com> wrote:

>MIF2Go can generate Confluence 4 XHTML, but I still 
>haven't managed to import it into Confluence except 
>page by page.

That's a lot better than not at all...  ;-)

Seriously, Confluence has no way to automate
adding a set of pages, as in all .xhtml in one 
directory?  That's a bit beyond our ability 
(or anyone else's besides Atlassian) to create.

>And there's no way to go the other direction, 
>which would actually be >the biggest selling point.

Confluence has no native export?  Or do you mean
there is no export to Frame specifically?  At one
time, we were planning to add a module to output
to Frame; we even reserved the domain go2mif.com.
But then FM9 happened, our many large enterprise 
customers started going to DITA (and some of them
to DocBook) en masse, not using Frame as editor.
So we didn't want to waste time on a collapsing 
market... even though I started with Frame 2 on 
SunOS, back in the day...

And there is a fundamental problem with any
round-tripping where Frame is one end.  Where
exactly do you put the info Frame needs, but
other formats do not allow?  This is a FAQ
for Word; we have a section in the User's Guide
that discusses the issue in detail.  The same
is true for most other formats, with the possible
exceptions of Interleaf <g> and to a lesser degree
InDesign.  If a feature isn't available at one
end or the other, you lose it in the round trip.
No, hiding it in Word "hidden text" doesn't work,
because it won't stay with its context when any
edits are made... which defeats the whole idea.

For DITA and DocBook, you have Frame structured
mode to support you, long as you create an app
for it, a tricky consulting job.  And you have
DITA-FMx, from Leximation, that handles a lot
of issues Adobe can't seem to fix.  For other
formats, good luck...

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>    http://mif2go.com/