Frame > Word > Frame -- is there a way to do this w/o going nuts?

[Tori Muir]

We've been maintaining a set of engineering specs for a client for >10 
years. The documents are large, 300+ page multi-chapter books, with 
header autonumbering that goes to 8 levels. About a year ago, client 
requested we give them the Frame content for one spec in Word so they 
could do some extensive edits. We did, and had not heard from them 
since. They contacted us 2 weeks ago, asking us to reformat the 
document. They'd compiled all the chapters into one 450-page Word doc 
and done 2-3 major revisions over the last year, all editing done by 
engineers and other folks with no expertise in long-document work.  It's 
a bit of a mess.

Now they want us to re-convert it into Frame. What would the recommended 
workflow be? We want to do this as cost-efficiently as possible for the 
client, but also keep our Frame template pristine and the data clean.

- We tried opening the Word doc (and  sub-sections thereof) in Frame 
(v9), but Frame crashes.

- We have saved selected chunks of the Word doc to RTF and imported to 
Frame. On the plus side, paragraph formatting comes in OK, and tables 
are tables (there are a bazillion tables). On the minus side, paragraphs 
with TOC references get split into two, one empty one with the reference 
marker, then one with the text. This is a significant issue in a manual 
whose TOC includes all 8 levels of the aforementioned autonumbered 
headers. Plus the dreaded missing-font message occurs, and I hate trying 
to track that down. And I'm a bit uneasy about corrupted cross 
references and other metadata that have been round-tripped thru Word, 
had bad experiences with that.

- We can also just blow the Word file out to plain text and reformat. 
Painful, but our Frame template remains clean that way. Or maybe a 
hybrid approach where we RTF the Word document, then use that to copy 
tables from (formatting them is time-consuming), and import the rest as 
plain text...

Recommendations?

Tori Muir
tmuir at spot-on-creative.com | 650.430.8674
www.spot-on-creative.com