I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
While MIF is a wonderful format for an ASCII description of a FM file,
it's really not intended for human consumption. First off, it's not
linear. Each FM object is defined in a section, and within that section
the objects are declared in reasonably orderly fashion, but it's really
complicated to jump from one object to another (as happens from
paragraphs to tables). Also, within a section, say the main body of
content, you may notice that the strings aren't always complete. You can
have a sentence fragment that ends in the middle of a word .. then
continues in the next block. This makes it really hard to search for
things since they may be split.
What you want is some sort of MIF-normalizer, that can make it more user
friendly. But, I don't think that really exists. There is a tool called
MIF-Muncher (http://www.stc-carolina.org/MIF+Muncher) .. that helps with
scanning for various objects in a MIF .. but I don't know that it'll
work on a modern system. I made a tool that converts MIF into MIFML (an
XML representation of a MIF) and back, but that doesn't make it any
easier to read.
MIFs are great but can also be a very scary place to hang out for much
time. :o
Cheers,
...scott
On 6/7/16 5:17 PM, Monique Semp wrote:
Do you really find it useful to diff MIF files very often?
Well, I haven't done it yet because it'd involve so much extra manual
work. But what I'd like to be able to do is simply scroll through the
commit list in my Git client (SourceTree on Windows) and have the
diffs show automatically, just as they do for source code. And with
MIF files, that'd be possible.
I have noticed, though, that the MIF files are *much* larger than the
corresponding FM files (a 197 KB FM file became a 952 KB MIF file!),
so now that I see this, I might rethink it.
But as one more tool to make it easier to see what's been done to a
particular file, in a way that's not even possible in the
FM/FrameMaker view, I'd really like to try it.
-Monique
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