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kevind1966
Participant
June 24, 2011
Question

Framemaker to In Design conversion using 3rd party tool

  • June 24, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 2001 views

Guys, we are evaluating a tool that will convert Framemaker documents into In Design format which we are more conversant with. Is this a risky approach? Is there anything we should look out for?

Thanks in advance

KevinD

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    1 reply

    P
    peter minneapolis
    Participating Frequently
    June 24, 2011

    kevind1966 wrote:

    Guys, we are evaluating a tool that will convert Framemaker documents into In Design format which we are more conversant with. Is this a risky approach? Is there anything we should look out for?

    Thanks in advance

    KevinD

    Hi, Kevin:

    It depends on how the FrameMaker documents are constructed, what you expect the conversion to preserve, and to what degree of precision the InDesign conversions need to reproduce the FrameMaker originals. Even nearly-perfect FrameMaker originals - strict adherence to use of paragraph, character, cross-reference, and table formats (aka "styles" in InDesign), auto-numbering, and other features - won't convert perfectly. Conversions of less-well-regulated documents may diverge even more from originals.

    Do you expect page-perfect reproduction of the originals? Or, is it sufficient to extract text? The more you can describe your expectations, the better the response to your question can be.

    If you expect to return the documents to FrameMaker after working on them in InDesign, there's no direct conversion tool yet.

    If your potential conversion tool is the MIF Filter plug-in for InDesign, from dtptools.com, you might want to read my review in the April/May 2008 (#23) issue of InDesign Magazine, available from the back issues section at InDesignmag.com. The filter works for free, but to save the converted results, you need to buy page credits, like buying minutes for a pre-paid phone card.

    If you're considering a different tool, it would help to know what it is and what it claims to be able to do.

    HTH

    Regards,

    Peter

    _______________________

    Peter Gold

    KnowHow ProServices

    K
    kevind1966Author
    Participant
    June 25, 2011

    Peter, our Studio is considering the MI

    F Filter plug in for In Design. I will have our Studio Manager read the review that you kindly directed me to and see what his view is. We have not seen a sample of the source files yet so I am unsure if the documents are structured or unstructured.

    The game plan (I think) it to be able to produce print ready files in the 3 European languages for the client. We will be doing the translation service, online soft proofing and managing the printed output too. I do not yet know if we need to return the files back to their natove Framemaker format but it is a question we will ask the client.

    Many thanks for your response. I will keep you posted.

    Regards

    Kevin

    Be.eM
    Be.eM
    Inspiring
    June 28, 2011

    Peter already outlined the most important points. This is a one-way street, and the owner of a FrameMaker document won't be happy about the format conversion, I think. Usually these people NEED to have access to the translated files, if only for backup purposes. Technical documentation has some very strict rules sometimes. He wouldn't be happy about Word files, too

    From my personal experience and tests of the MIF filter: if your FM document is very clean (no style overrides), the result looks very convincing on the first look. However, there are some basic concepts which are handled differently in both applications. One example is space above/below paragraphs. FM always uses the bigger one (but only one), when two paragraphs follow each other. InDesign adds the two values. In order to mimic the FM appearance (when converting to strictly keep the FM layout), the filter creates tons of paragraph style overrides, which makes your target document no longer clean. Or: InDesign doesn't support numberings in header/footer variables (at least up to CS4, don't know about CS5). So if the FM documents has such elements in the header/footer area, it will fail in ID. Next possible problem: cross references. ID's abilities to handle these are much smaller and sometimes unreliable, especially when xrefs point to separate documents (like chapters in a book).

    On the other hand, a translation process to any language which is supported by FM (which is the majority, as long as it's not about R2L languages like Arabic or Hebrew) is very simple and straightforward. Feed FrameMaker MIFs into Trados (or another TM), do the translation in the Tag Editor/Workbench, and export translated MIFs again. The result should be a very clean FM document, which doesn't mean any more efforts for formatting than a strict InDesign based (INX, IDML) translation workflow.

    Yes, I'd call it a high risk you're taking there, just because YOU know ID better, me thinks…

    I'm through all that. The manuals we write are usually translated into 20-30 languages, including e.g. Arabic (that's what I needed the ID versions for), all European languages, and Chinese and Japanese. We're doing all the final DTP work after translation. I'd avoid changing the format whenever possible, it's twice the work.

    Bernd

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