[Framers] devolution: Framemaker to Word

[Bill Greve]

The problem with this is it churns out a completely unformatted word doc: every style is normal, tables are broken, xrefs don't. A style needs to be applied to every block of text.

New request: I need to convert FM to Word where the resulting Word document requires as little massaging as possible to be a fully formatted doc like a Framemaker book.

Bill Greve 

-----Original Message-----
From: Owen, Clint [mailto:clint.owen at craneae.com] 
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2017 10:59 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Cc: Bill Greve
Subject: RE: devolution: Framemaker to Word

Bill,

We have found that the latest versions of Adobe Acrobat do a decent job of converting PDF to Word, better and easier than FM to Word. Just go from FM to PDF, then save as Word from Adobe Acrobat. You need the full version of Acrobat, not just reader.

Clint

Clint Owen | Technical Writer Specialist | Crane Aerospace & Electronics | +1 425 743 8674 | Fax: +1 425 743 8113

-----Original Message-----
From: Framers [mailto:framers-bounces+clint.owen=craneaerospace.com at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Bill Greve
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2017 4:24 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: [Framers] devolution: Framemaker to Word

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?