[Framers] Searching for content in FrameMaker files

[Robert Lauriston]

Agent Ransack and other good search utilities don't need to decode an
.fm file to find individual words. If you look at an .fm file in a
text editor, you can see that the text is not compressed or encrypted.
There are all kinds of control characters mixed in, so if you're
searching for a multi-word string a search utility might miss it.

If Windows search can't find the string Thoreau inside an .fm file,
that's because it's a poor excuse for a search utility.

On Sat, May 7, 2016 at 6:57 AM, Fred Ridder <DocuDoc at hotmail.com> wrote:
> You're not doing anything wrong. It's just the way Windows works.
>
> The ability to find text strings in the content of a file depends on Windows knowing how to decode the file (if it's a binary type) and parse the contents. Windows knows how to parse most common non-proprietary file formats, like TXT, RTF, HTML, PDF, and so on. And it knows how to parse the file formats used by Microsoft applications, like DOC, DOCX, XLS, VSD, PST. But there's no return on investment for Microsoft spending the effort to program Windows to parse non-Microsoft application file formats like those used by FrameMaker. Simply adding the filename extensions to the list of file types to be indexed does not teach Windows how to decode and parse the files. It's possible that Windows would figure out how to parse a MIF file, since it is text based rather than binary, but I would never expect Windows to be able to do full-text indexing on a .fm binary file.