My customer got FM 7 and we have FM 11. Can I still edit and save FM 7 files in FM 11? If yes, later, can customer open the edited files in FM 7?

> I knew you’d be able to explain the Unicode thing better ...

Actually, that's "more than I know about it". In reviewing the history of FM at daube.ch, it appears that Unicode support started creeping in at 7.0, but wasn't really complete until 8.0. I've never seen any detailed description of exactly what newer FMs do in the way of Unicode transformations, and to what, when importing old FM files. I'm not even sure how complete the Unicode support is at FM12, such as support for code points above the BMP (16-bit), and support for notation thereof.

I work in a shop still using FM7.1 and earlier versions. Some of the legacy content here opens as FM4. When we send out manuals for translation, the translators are almost always on FM8 or later. We bring the content up to 7.1, and send them both binary and MIF*. In current documents, we have implemented all non-ASCII (Basic Latin in Unicode) text as Variables, to provide a central edit point for issues related to the code points used. We ask for translated MIF back, and are fully aware that it might not be useful on our FM7.1 platforms (we also have several FM9, 11 & 12 PCs available in that case).

______

* Why send them MIF?

Because they might be on an older FM rather than a newer. I rarely deal directly with the translators (our export department is in charge of that), but looking at the PDFinfo of what we get back, some of the houses are astonishingly primitive. In many cases sending them .fm or .mif hardly matters, as they are using Word , often using our PDF as the copy-paste source. We've seen several cases where they apparently used PowerPoint .