Anyone know of an FM to TeX "converter"

Tue May 28 14:21:52 PDT 2013

Thanks, Alan!

You have mentioned one thing that will indeed be _relatively_ (I hope) easy for me. Most of my FrameMaker documents are long specifications and documents, where I was careful to use a template to get similar look and feel. Yes, the template has evolved over time, but it should not be too painful to conform even older documents to them without _too_ much work - whenever I updated a spec, I would update it to the new template regardless!

So, I am hoping that converting to the la_temp templates from that site you and David pointed me to _may_ also work fine. If I can apply those templates consistently, and get the "same as if I had done the documents in LaTeX in the first place" outcome, then that is perfectly fine with me, even if the PDF output looks very different from what I currently have in my documents! At least, I will be in a _new_ consistent format place. :)

Of course, this needs a lot of testing!

For my remaining FrameMaker files that are not consistent specs, and have very different look and feel in general, I suspect I will just convert them to Word - most of them are fairly short.

Once I can get my non-spec FrameMaker documents over to Word reasonably cleanly (maybe a purchase of Mif2Go will be necessary!), then I think that I will be quite comfortable in the future.

And, then, Adobe's recent upgrade price gouging, and their push to cloud-controlled tools, will be non-events for me then, fortunately!

By the way, my recent tests of Microsoft Word 2013, in preparation for getting rid of FrameMaker permanently, have been surprisingly decent - much better than my way earlier frustrations with it. My latest white paper was written entirely in Word last week - almost 30 pages long - and it is looking very good. No funny crashes, oddball behavior (that I could not change/control), etc. And the PDF from it is excellent, including with hyperlinks.

Z

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Alan T Litchfield
Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 2:01 PM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Anyone know of an FM to TeX "converter"

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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