FrameMaker MIF to RTF

When you are going from FrameMaker to a different environment, you often need to adapt some aspects of your document to work with it. The commonest is your choice of fonts; sometimes the ones you used in Frame just aren’t available where you’re going. So we provide a simple way, in the .ini file, to map fonts. For example, the line “Courier=Courier New” maps from the PostScript font to a TrueType version. Similarly, we provide a section where you can map your format names, as in “1Hed=Heading 1” to use a standard Word style name.

What if you need different mappings for different projects? No, you don’t have to keep changing your .ini file around. Just use different file directories; the filter always looks in the current directory for the correct .ini file to use. You can get even more elaborate. All DCL filters can be run from the command line, as well as from within FrameMaker, so you can use them in scripts. The .bat-file FOR command understands wild cards, and allows you to specify many names at once. You’ll never have to sit around waiting for one file to finish so that you can ask for the next one.

Not that you’d be sitting around waiting for long, anyway; the filter is fast. For example, it converts a 477K MIF file, to make a 60K RTF file, in about 3 seconds on a 2GHz Pentium running Windows 2000 Pro with 512MB RAM. This is seriously less time than it takes Frame to load the very same MIF file. For rough estimates, figure on a conversion speed of about twenty pages per second (including graphics pages). You’re not likely to encounter many Frame files that take over a minute to convert.

Made with Mif2Go