[Framers] ExtendScript for save as text, for Git usage ?

[Chris Despopoulos]

Coming in late, but I want to chime in on MIF.  As I recall, MIF also includes object IDs, and they get generated every time you open a file.  Note that each object in your document has two IDs...  The ObjectID, which is what you usually use to access the object in a script or the FDK, and the Unique ID.  The Unique ID persists across saves and opens.  But since MIF includes the Object IDs, you will never have a DIFF that shows two versions of the file being the same.  

MIF is essentially (or WAS at any rate) a text representation of the binary file format.  Neither MIF nor binary are particularly friendly.  
In the old days (before Tables, I think) Frame Technology supported a format called Maker Markup Language (MML).  This was like a cross between XML and MIF. It extracted the flow content and tagged each object with the corresponding format from the catalog (plus any evil inline formatting).  I think it also described the master/ref pages, but I forget.  The result was a text format that is much more friendly than MIF.  I have often thought I would get around to recreating MML.  It would be most useful.  For example, you could imagine MML to MarkDown filtering, which would be really cool.  If you could keep Maker files in text (say templates, catalogs, insets, boilerplate, and other content) then you could simplify web-based services to manage your Maker work flow. In my spare time... (I experimented with a web app to manage variables...  It was pretty cool if I say so myself.)
A new MML initiative would be pretty useful, eh?  Could be unstructured-only, since XML renders MML unnecessary...
cud
PSSorry -- I don't have a script handy to save as text.  It should be trivial...  Loop the book and save as text.  There might even be samples out there that do 90% of it already.