Are mif files considered structured?

   A MIF file is simply a text representation of a complete FrameMaker document, including all the formatting information and definitions as well as the text. Just as a FrameMaker document may, but need not, contain structured information, a MIF file may, but need not, contain structured information.

   Saving your Mif file as a FrameMaker document does not remove any of the structure information, which is why you are continuing to see the warning message each time you open the FrameMaker version of the file.

   Before you remove it, you may want to confirm that you don't need it. The basic unit of a structured document is an element. A structured document contains two types of structure inforrmation:

1. Definitions of the structure elements that can be used.
2. Elements in the document's content that use those definitions.

If your document defines elements but never use them (and you never intend to), you are safe removing the definitions. To confirm your document doesn't use them, open the MIF file with a plain text editor such as Notepad.  Search for the string:

     <ElementBegin

If no occurrences are found, your document doesn't use elements and you can remove any element definitions it contains.

Russ's suggestion to use File > Import > Element Definitions from an unstructured document will remove any existing element definitions. However, I doubt that the File > Import > Element Definitions command is available in the unstructured user interface and I'm too lazy to reconfigure my copy of FrameMaker to check. 

You can edit the MIF file to remove the element definitions. They start with a line that reads:

     <ElementDefCatalog

and end with a line containing:

     > # end of ElementDefCatalog

Just delete those two lines and everything between them. Be careful, them. The sample file I inspected had something like 4,000 lines in that part of the MIF file.

Please start another thread if you'd like to know all about the advantages of structured documents.

     --Lynne

Hi, I think Bob's theory is likely correct. But you should not need to worry about it, unless structure was added to the document text which I doubt. I'm almost sure that if you select Open for Editing and just open the files, FM will automatically strip out all structure-related metadata in the document. If the document looks normal afterwards, you can just save it and you should not see that message again.

There is also the option to select the files in the book, select File > Import > Element Definitions, and then specify any known unstructured file to import from. This will also strip out structure information. But I'm almost sure that just opening the files in unstructured FrameMaker will do that once and permanently.

Russ

I think what Bob has suggested has probably happened - if you didn't tell them your docs were Unstructured, they probably proceeded with their copy of Structired FM and saved out the MIF from that. I would edit them to strip out the Structure and tell them in the future that you're using Unstructured FM.

While .mif (as for .fm and .book) have strict internal structure, there is no connection to Structured documents. A MIF can contain a Structured or an Unstructured FM document. Merely saving an unstruc as a MIF will not convert it to structured, and no similar dialog is expected on re-open.

MIF is merely a {mostly} human-readable version of .fm binary.

What seems to have happened here is that the outside translators imported your unstruc content into their structure templates, editted, rendered, and sent you back structured MIF. Your choices would appear to be to either:

• collapse the document back to unstruc, or
• elect to maintain it as structured (and they may not have sent you everything you need for structured stewardship (DTD? EDD?).

Not having worked in structured FM, I'm not sure what external resources a project might require. And then there's the learning curve…