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Question

Open DOCX crashes latest version of FrameMaker

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
July 30, 2024
4 replies
481 views

We are trying to reconstruct documentation that was developed in FrameMaker but we only have the PDF output. We can use Acrobat to convert PDF to DOCX which works well and we get the cross references working in Microsoft Word. When we try to open the docx in FrameMaker, the application crashes.

If support is intersted we can share the document to reproduce the crash.

If we try to import a much smaller version of our DOCX, we can see that the cross references are not correclty imported., the markers are there, but the cross references are all broken.

If there is a better way to recostruct the FrameMkaer files from the PDF we would love to hear.

It seems bizare that Microsoft Word does a better job importing from the PDF.

Thanks

Ivan Pedruzzi

This topic has been closed for replies.

F

FrameMaker-dk

Community Expert

Rather than importing the text from the Word files, have you tried copy/pasting the entire "thing" from Word into FrameMaker?.

I have just finished a large project based on a similar premis and I used the copy/paste procedure and made it work. I got index words and cross references along just fine.

If you are interested, I shall be glad to take a look at your project outside of the forum. You can find me at FrameMaker.dk.

Bjørn Smalbro - FrameMaker.dk

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

As other experts have pointed out, PDF was never designed to be a round-trip format (although some apps can add private data to allow it, with some bloat).

When I had this problem (and I did from time to time), I would just copy out the text as plaintext, and focus deeper recovery efforts on extracting any graphics at maximum quality, often deconstructing indvidual PDF page in Illustrator, leaving just the graphic object, then re-saved as EPS.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

Was the PDF tagged?

Did the conversion make a lot of text boxes in Word vs. standard Word text?

Try saving as RTF and reopen in Word.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

ivanp9164113Author

Participating Frequently

Dave, we tried many combiantions, the following open by Frame but the xref are broken

- PDF to RTF
- PDF to DOCX to DOC

ivanp9164113Author

Participating Frequently

it's all text and tables there are no text boxes and may be 20 images.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

First off, you know you're not talking to Support, right? This is a user-to-user forum.
If FM2022 (you don't mention the version #, but that's the latest) is crashing when trying to import a Word doc, then there's probably something messed up in the doc. The workflow of FM to PDF to Word is not a reversable process without some pain along the way. Your best bet is to clean up the Word docs with standardized formating and then use a template to map those Word styles to FM paragraph tags.
OR you can brute force it and just copy/paste the content as plain text in FM and then spend your time fixing up the formatting and xrefs.

Jeff_Coatsworth

Community Expert

Oh, and if you want to contact the FM folks - see https://helpx.adobe.com/contact/enterprise-support.other.html#framemaker for your Adobe Support options. I'd recommend using the tcssup@adobe.com e-mail address as it reaches a team dedicated to Technical Communication Suite products including FrameMaker.

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