Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

[Robert Lauriston]

You might evaluate migrating to Flare, its Word export and import are
significantly better than FrameMaker's, and its FrameMaker import is
very good.

MadCap now claims that Flare supports round-tripping for use as an
add-on for FrameMaker. I don't know if that's an exaggeration or if it
still requires some manual cleanup in FM after import as it did in
7.1:

http://forums.madcapsoftware.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=13473

In my last job I was unable to get RoboHelp's Word export to do what I
needed it to do, but if you've ordered TCS5 anyway, you might as well
give it a shot. But that won't improve import.

On Fri, Feb 21, 2014 at 6:20 AM, Harding, Dan <dharding at illinois.edu> wrote:
> Good morning,
>
> We have used the same authoring process for eons: Authors/editors work in MS Word, as well as preliminary indexing work. I then take the MS Word file, import into FM (unstructured) and do the final print-ready formatting, making things adhere to our publishing standards and tightening up consistency.
>
> As a process it work well... until it's time to revise the book for the next edition.
>
> Our authors and editors will ONLY work in MS Word. PDF comments/revisions will not work, as there frequently are extensive revisions including insertion of new sections (multiple pages) of content, as well as shuffling of content.
>
> When I export the final FM version back to MS Word for them to work on, the conversion is VERY crude and frequently requires extensive work on the post-conversion Word files for the editors to be able to work within the files.
>
> Then of course there's the reformatting from scratch in FM when the revisions are done (which actually is faster and more reliable than trying to reconcile changes in the MS Word version with the existing FM version).
>
> Is there a better way to perform the round-trip process given the MS Word requirement, and barring that, are there better ways/tools to get cleaner MS Word files from FM than exporting to RTF?