Hi Adam, Yes, converting back and forth between FM binary and MIF is considered safe. There are a couple of exceptions that I can think of:
1) If you save a FM document as MIF and then use an earlier version of FrameMaker to open the MIF document, you will lose "features" that are not supported in the earlier version of FrameMaker. 2) If you save a structured document as MIF and attempt to open it with unstructured FM, you would lose the original document's structure. However, you should get a warning about this when you open the document. As far as the task at hand, you could use FrameScript for this and not have to bother with the FM to MIF to FM step at all. Send me a sample document offlist and I will see what is involved with writing a script. Thanks. Rick Quatro Carmen Publishing Inc 585-659-8267 www.frameexpert.com > Is converting between .fm and .mif file formats considered to be safe > (ie. no data lost in translation)? My understanding is that they should > be - and indeed, I did not notice any glaring differences when I open a > .fm and it's corrosponding .mif in Framemaker. > > However, when I attempted the following experiment: > 1) Open .fm file, save as .mif > 2) Open .mif from 1), save as .fm (with different name) > 3) Open .fm from 2), save as .mif. > 4) Compare .mif files created in 1) and 3) using a text diff tool. > > I found that there were a number of differences, some of which are > probably safe to ignore (like <XRefLastUpdate> elements), but some are > more concerning (<TabStop> and <PgfNumTabs> elements missing in the > latter file, <PgfPDFStructureLevel> elements having different values..) > > Goal: > In the process of converting several documents from paper to framemaker > documents, a large number of (rather randomly placed) "discretionary > hyphen" characters were inserted (probably by the OCR software). I > cannot seem to select these characters for use with the find/replace > tool in Framemaker, so my idea was to convert to .mif, remove all > instances of <Char DiscHyphen>, and then save back as FM. This appears > to be successful, subject to my concerns above. > > > So, I'm wondering.. is it safe to round-trip between .fm and .mif files? > And if not, is there an alternate way of accomplishing my task of > removing these extra characters? > > Thanks, > Adam Schweitzer > Orenda Aerospace Corporation > _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
