Importing a Microsoft Word document as a FrameMaker Book (not document)
I've just upgraded to 2019 from 2012. I work in an environment where
- An author writes the first several drafts of a fiction manuscript in FrameMaker.
- Once done, the FM document is ported over into Microsoft Word so that the editing team and beta readers can collaborate during this process.
- Once this process is complete, the document is ported back in FM for typesetting and publishing.
We're dealing with fiction manuscripts holding close to 300,000 words each. These are non-XML documents.
In Microsoft Word, each chapter lives in its own section. We've upgraded to 2019 to leverage the import function that would allow us to bring a document from Word into Framemaker. From the preliminary exploration, the expanded import feature maps Word paragraph and character styles to FrameMaker's which is great. However, I do not believe that this import function can map each chapter in Word to a document included in the book.
The alternatives would be to import the word document into FrameMaker and
- Keep it as a single document. Would there be performance concerns with FM 19 x64 with documents holding 300,000 words?
- Turn the document into a book manually.
- Rely on a script to do that. This would be preferable and before we sit down and write such a script, I wanted to ask if you would happen to know of such a script?
FM 19 has gone a long way to simplify the interaction between FM and Microsoft Word, especially since it is able to publish HMTL which Word can import. Turning a document into a book would be a great addition.
Thanks for any help or feedback you might have on this.
