A hearty public endorsement for Mif2Go - thanks, Jeremy!

Thu Aug 1 11:00:03 PDT 2013

Hi, all.

As part of my project to move all my documents from FrameMaker to Confluence, I had been planning to use Mif2Go to get my FM documents into other formats.

Well, the opportunity to test/start a similar process arose sooner than I expected. One of my specifications needed urgent updates by a SME for me to check later. The SME only has Word and I have not yet moved any documents to Confluence, so I decided to create a Word version for now (which I can _later_ move to Confluence after the updates are done).

So, I bought Mif2Go ... with some trepidation ... fully expecting to spend a _lot_ of time understanding how to get the result I wanted, asking a lot of questions of Jeremy, not getting the right output, doing a ton of editing (FrameMaker _and_ Word), writing software to massage/edit the MIF files, tearing my hair out, etc., etc., etc.

In reality, the effort was relatively smooth ... without having to send a single e-mail to Omni Systems and Jeremy for support or questions!

In less than a day's worth of work (includes some hours reading the Mif2Go documentation), with only minor edits to the original FrameMaker files, I was able to create a perfectly structured and clean Word version of a 140 page document - paragraph formats, character formats, and all. It can easily be edited by the SME now and I can move the final doc to Confluence later.

The only real issue I encountered was auto-numbering - the FrameMaker capabilities are much better than Word. But, I had already anticipated that this would cause me some trouble (based on my read of the Mif2Go documentation).

I use quite "standard" chapter and section numbering in my specifications (the usual "1", "1.1", "1.1.1" stuff) but I also use auto-numbering for text in some paragraphs that extend into the side-heads for "Notes" messages, as well as specification numbering paragraphs using variables as part of the auto-number.

Thus, I had to make a choice as to how to bring these auto-numbers over - the controls in Mif2Go cannot (not surprisingly) be tweaked to accommodate for all FrameMaker auto-number possibilities in a general way. After some testing (and editing sessions in Word) that showed the trade-offs between multiple approaches, I was able to pick one that minimized the final edits to the Word document (with minor edits to the paragraph designs in FrameMaker).

The results were not perfect, but with some manual editing, in about 5 or 6 hours of effort (spread out over a couple of afternoons), I was done transferring this 130 page document to Word! The drawings in the document will need changes later, but this can wait - they will need to be created/edited using other tools even when using Confluence.

Without Mif2Go, I believe that I would have had to spend many days ... bringing in bare text manually to Word and then adding in all the format fixes (for example, for emphasized text, bolding, etc.).

So, thanks, Jeremy! Mif2Go is excellent and deserves all the kudos it gets.

Z
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