FrameMaker MIF to RTF

One of the reasons Framers need to generate RTF is in support of Windows Help. If your Frame files are documenting a product usable on Windows, you may need some way to use your documentation as the basis for topic files for WinHelp. So Mif2Go includes many facilities specifically designed to support that usage.

Consider the problems. In Frame, you have page breaks at the start of sections, and may have others wherever you feel they improve the appearance of the print docs. For Help, a page break signals the start of a new topic, or of a popup. Within Help, you identify topics, jumps, and popups with non-numeric footnotes, double underscores, and hidden text; Frame allows none of these. Your graphics must become external, placeable WMFs or BMPs. In your RTF text, you cannot use curly quotes, or dashes, or many other common characters, so you can’t just use Frame’s conditional text to produce two versions. What to do?

We decided that you should be able to use a single document source for both your printed documentation and your WinHelp topic files. We wanted you to be able to do all your work in Frame, and none at all in Word; the RTF file should be quick and easy to recreate whenever you make changes in the underlying Frame document. In fact, Word should not be required at all; the output from the filter should be ready for the Windows Help Compiler. We achieved these goals; here is how we do it.

Made with Mif2Go