FrameMaker MIF to RTF

If you’ve ever tried to convert to RTF using the filter included with FrameMaker 4.x, you’ve likely seen some significant problems. First off, you’re greeted with a pile of text fragments which are what’s left of your master and reference pages. In the body, when you apply a character property like bold, ^superscript, or _subscript, the filter often does not notice when you have finished with it and returned to normal, until after you apply a different property; then you get stuck in the new one. Tabs are hardly ever right; indents hop around for no visible reason. Character styles are typically ignored. Required page breaks disappear. If you center a head in a table column, the rest of the column is centered too. And, of course, all your graphics are gone without a trace, except for the pile of fragments at the end which came from your text rects.

The filter included with later vesions of FrameMaker improves on this a bit, but still has some problems, such as the missing Frame native graphics. The documentation for 5.1 proposes some methods for making WinHelp RTF topic files, but offers little automation of the process; you can create some of the special footnotes by hand, but in a real task you’ll quickly hit several walls. (More on that here.) Oddly enough, when Adobe rewrote the docs for Frame 5.5, all of the information about RTF conversion was removed.

This may be acceptable in a pinch, or if your document is very simple and has no tables or graphics. But normally, you’re in for many, many hours of labor just to get back to where you started, and you’ll do that time in Word, not in your beloved Frame. If you have a large book to do, better plan on a week or two for the prep work and cleanup. Or, you can buy Mif2Go and be done in a few minutes.

Our filter starts by doing the basic job right. Your master page information is interpreted to produce Word headers and footers, complete with graphics, or else omitted if you so choose. Some reference page information is used to support Frame Above and Below; most of the rest has nowhere to go in Word, so we leave it out. Your character and paragraph formats work just as they did in Frame, subject only to RTF’s inherent limitations. Page breaks are present, and tabs and indents come out the way you’d expect. Tables have the same look as they had in Frame, including border styles and weights. And your internal Frame graphics are all there, converted to editable WMF format.

Made with Mif2Go