We've been maintaining a set of engineering specs for a client for >10 years. The documents are large, 300+ page multi-chapter books, with header autonumbering that goes to 8 levels. About a year ago, client requested we give them the Frame content for one spec in Word so they could do some extensive edits. We did, and had not heard from them since. They contacted us 2 weeks ago, asking us to reformat the document. They'd compiled all the chapters into one 450-page Word doc and done 2-3 major revisions over the last year, all editing done by engineers and other folks with no expertise in long-document work. It's a bit of a mess.
Now they want us to re-convert it into Frame. What would the recommended workflow be? We want to do this as cost-efficiently as possible for the client, but also keep our Frame template pristine and the data clean. - We tried opening the Word doc (and sub-sections thereof) in Frame (v9), but Frame crashes. - We have saved selected chunks of the Word doc to RTF and imported to Frame. On the plus side, paragraph formatting comes in OK, and tables are tables (there are a bazillion tables). On the minus side, paragraphs with TOC references get split into two, one empty one with the reference marker, then one with the text. This is a significant issue in a manual whose TOC includes all 8 levels of the aforementioned autonumbered headers. Plus the dreaded missing-font message occurs, and I hate trying to track that down. And I'm a bit uneasy about corrupted cross references and other metadata that have been round-tripped thru Word, had bad experiences with that. - We can also just blow the Word file out to plain text and reformat. Painful, but our Frame template remains clean that way. Or maybe a hybrid approach where we RTF the Word document, then use that to copy tables from (formatting them is time-consuming), and import the rest as plain text... Recommendations? Tori Muir tmuir at spot-on-creative.com | 650.430.8674 www.spot-on-creative.com
