Need ideas - Moving large files from one folder to another without breaking links

[Wei JIANG [PT-CN]]

Dear Salome,

If you know how to write regular expressions, or know someone who does 
and is available to help you, I guess my experience may be helpful:

I work remotely  for a major molding machine manufacturer in Europe - I 
translate and typeset their manuals into Chinese in FrameMaker.  And I 
also head a team which handles Japanese and Korean.

My contact sends in her files in a zip package of fm/book files. The 
thing is, from time to time, or rather, almost every time, the fm files 
in the book file  are grabbed from different folders on their systems, 
and when I open/update the files, the warnings about broken cross-ref's 
and missing images are overwhelming.  I used to correct all these 
manually, and it was hell to me! Now we have an in-house tool to 
manipulate the re-saved MIF files. The tool searches the content of each 
MIF file by using regular expressions and comes up with a list of linked 
images and cross-ref's, and then tries to locate them on the hard disk. 
If any files cannot be found, then you can specify a base folder for the 
tool to search. After all the files are found, then you can instruct the 
tool to modify the MIF accordingly.

In your case, you do not really need to write any code. You may just use 
a regular expression developing tool to complete all the above steps, 
for example, RegexBuddy.  This tool is very sophisticated, and it even 
has a GREP function, which enables you to search and modify all files in 
a folder (and all its subfolders!).

Just for your reference, the regular expression for looking for a 
cross-ref'ed fm that is located in another folder is:

(<XRefSrcFile `)<u\\>.*?(<c\\>[^\\<>]+?.fm'>)
And you replace this with "$1$2", and the cross-ref'ed fm will be the 
one in the current folder.

I'm sure you can fairly easily come up with a regular expression to 
correct the image linkage info.

Hope the above is helpful to you.

Kindest,
Wei JIANG
Senior Translator & Project Manager
Based in Beijing, China


On 9/28/2012 11:18 PM, Abungu, Salome (TTI Mpls) wrote:
>
> Does anyone know of  a program that will allow me to move several 
> files to another folder without breaking links to graphics in other 
> folders? We've imported graphics by using the "import by reference" 
> option instead of copying the graphics to the document. We've done 
> this because copying the graphics into the document bloats it. Our 
> manuals have been created by several writers over the years. I have 
> hundreds of files to move but haven't done it yet because of this 
> issue. I could open each book file and FrameMaker files and just 
> archive them but again, there are hundreds of these things to move.
>
> Any ideas are certainly appreciated.
>
> Have a great weekend!
>
> Salome Abungu
>
>
>
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