How to extract text and equations from Framemaker

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
September 22, 2021
3 replies
705 views

I need to extract the text and equations from a Framemaker file. The export to RTF option convert the equations into picture. Can I get math type equations?

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LinSims

Community Expert

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is that we had a fairly extensive discussion on this about a month back, both here and on the Frameusers e-mail list, because someone else needed to be able to extract equations; and despite the best efforts of a lot of people, we couldn't find a way to do it.

I think the closest we got was IF you used Math ML and not the Equation Editor, and IF you exported from Frame to XML, or more likely to SGML, and IF you had a DTD set up properly, you MIGHT be able to get something useable. Unfortunately, no one had the time or expertise to follow through and see if that would work.

4everJang

Legend

With the Design Science plug-in for MathML in FrameMaker, creating and extracting equations was possible, but since that company was taken over by Wiris there has been no replacement for the plug-in. This does not mean that there is no possible solution - there almost always is. But some solutions will cost more than you can spare.

FrameMaker uses its own internal equations format, which is also output in MIF files. That representation is not like any existing equations standard but given there is enough budget a conversion to the math standard of choice can be created. It is a matter of processing the text string of the equation (from the MIF file) into math expressions. I have done the reverse (changing MathML into FrameMaker equations) some time ago for a large customer project.

Depending on the format you need and the complexity of the equations this could take a couple of weeks up to a couple of months to program. If you have no budget for this you are probably stuck with manually retyping the equations in some kind of math type editor outside of FrameMaker (I would suggest Wiris in MS Word, for instance).

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

What are the Object Properties of the equations in the FM file?

They could be legacy Frame math, Math ML, EPS, SVG, PDF, or any number of other things, local/pasted in, or imported by reference. Not all configurations will provide something you can extract.

Publishing to PDF, then using OCR in Acrobat DC or similar might provide content that can at least be copied as plain text.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

I suspect all you'd get are images of the equations.

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