Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

[rebecca officer]

Hi Dan
 
How much are you wedded to Frame and Word? If the issue is just that they need a free editor and you need good PDFs, it could be worth changing tools. LaTeX could be a possiblity, as could converting to DITA. With DITA, you could use Framemaker and they could use a free editor like Serna.
 
Cheers
Rebecca


>>> "Harding, Dan" <dharding at illinois.edu> 28/02/14 02:53 >>>
I initially tried that method, as the formatting results are wonderful when you get to Word, considerably better than the direct RTF export. However, in going that route all index markers are lost (whereas when you export to RTF from Frame they are retained).

Any solution that deletes the index markers is a nonstarter for us.

Thanks.

-Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Salo (Ariens Plant 1) [mailto:asalo at ariens.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, February 25, 2014 9:17 AM
To: Harding, Dan; framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

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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