[Framers] devolution: Framemaker to Word

[Keith Soltys]

I feel your pain. I had to do this with a book a couple of years ago

The biggest issue I found was working with multiple files. The original
book was about 20 files. I ended up merging it into six. Fortunately there
weren't a lot of cross references to deal with.

Word is quite capable of handling large files now (300 pages is the biggest
I have). The document map and search features are actually superior to
FrameMaker's IMHO (I use Word 2013). Do make sure to use styles rigorously
and define your numbered and bulleted lists properly using the new
multilevel list styles. Here's a link to a blog article
<http://www.soltys.ca/blog/2015/07/how-to-create-a-word-2013-template-from-scratch.html>
I wrote after we upgraded everyone to Word 2013 and I was able to rebuild
our templates from scratch.

If you have reusable content or want to use conditional text in Word, I
highly recommend 36 Software's SmartDocs add-in. It's not cheap but it
makes Word a viable alternative to FrameMaker for many situations, and in
some areas it's better than Frame (the snippet handling, variables, and
snapshots).

Regards
Keith

--
*Keith Soltys*
Senior Technical Writer
Architecture
TMX Group
(416) 947-4397
http://www.tmx.com/

On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 7:24 AM, Bill Greve <Bill.Greve at worldpay.us> wrote:

> For [reasons], I have a large number of Framemaker books (FM11) I need to
> convert to Word docs.
>
> I've just pulled up the Mif2Go user's guide to try and figure out how that
> works. Does anyone have any Mif2Go experience to share? Tips/process/etc...
>
> Is there anything else anyone can recommend?
>
> My first thought is I need to create a Word template with style names
> mirroring the FM template. Then save FM files as rtf and somehow apply the
> Word template to successfully update the styles??? I'm expecting this to be
> slow and tedious.
>
> Majority of books are under 40 pages and just a handful of chapters that
> I'll just combine into a single Word doc. Then there's a decent handful of
> a few hundred pages with 15-20 chapters and appendices that makes me
> shudder thinking about maintaining these in Word. Is using Word's Master
> Document a viable solution for the more unwieldy FM books? If so, is it
> worth explaining to the people I'm handing them off to and no longer
> supporting?
>
>
> Thank you,
> Bill
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