Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

[Alan Salo (Ariens Plant 1)]

Hi everyone. First post.

My team converts our material to Word frequently for our Product Support
group to use.

Our trick is to create a pdf of the Frame document (as we normally do;
our preferred delivery). We then use Acrobat's File... > Save As
Other... > Microsoft Word... to create a .docx Word doc. Even the tables
stay tidy.

We're on Windows 7 64-bit Enterprise, FrameMaker 11 and Acrobat Pro XI.

Thanks,
Alan

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Harding, Dan
Sent: Friday, February 21, 2014 8:21 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

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?

Would making the change from unstructured to structured FM on my part
help in this regard?

Environment:

Windows 7 64-bit Enterprise
Framemaker 10 (unstructured) [NOTE: TCS 5 is on order but I have not
received it yet.] Microsoft Office 2010

Thank you in advance.

Dan Harding
University of Illinois Tax School

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