Anyone know of an FM to TeX "converter"

[Alan T Litchfield]

There have been the la_mml templates and stuff around for a while: 
http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/software/framemaker/

I think a better approach (depending upon how many unique FM functions 
and formats you require) might be to export the text to rtf or xml and 
take that into a LaTeX environment. If you use XML, you might want to 
consider xelatex because it has better support for UTF8.
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=xetex

rtf2latex2e has been around a while now and does a reasonable job of 
converting to LaTeX, but of course, you will need to manually fix tables 
and such. There is always a certain amount of cleaning up required.
http://rtf2latex2e.sourceforge.net/

The biggest issue (always the case) is the large number of possible 
combinations of style and format in the source document and how these 
are to be translated through a common filter. This is where any of the 
scripted solutions tend to have their weak points. If, however, you are 
anything like me and tend to use similarly named styles and formats over 
the years, then using named output formats for conversion is made 
simpler. That may mean changing the scripts to suit.

The beauty of TeX and friends is that there are virtually unlimited 
options available when defining and redefining macros. For the unwary, 
that is also its downside. That means too, that a lot (and I mean a 
lottt) can be scripted if automation is desired.

So, if you have a large number of files that need conversion and they 
are somewhat similar in style. You might want to consider creating a 
batch process to dump all the files out as text and then run them all 
through a conversion filter. After that, you have look for anomalies as 
d/required.

Alan

On 29/05/13 8:27 AM, Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain at aeris.net) wrote:
> Hi, all.
>
> As the subject says ... a MIF (or binary-FM) to TeX would be a good tool!
>
> LaTeX would be far more useful, but I suspect that getting a clean fit from _any_ given FM file to templates in LaTeX might be difficult. Getting the output "close enough" would be workable, as long as I could tweak the output files to make them work out well in LaTeX.
>
> In my search to reduce my dependency on FrameMaker (because of the recent Adobe pricing and cloud decisions), I am hoping to change my 17+ years of FrameMaker files to another format. I  have used LaTeX in the distant past, and for 90% of my specifications written in FrameMaker, it would be a completely workable solution! The remaining ones could be moved to Word.
>
> Z
>
> P.S.: Jeremy (hoping you are reading this e-mail), does Mif2Go perhaps support output in TeX? Or any possible plans to do so?
>
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