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Inspiring
July 12, 2022
Question

The old InDesign to Frameamker conversion trick....

  • July 12, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 305 views

I foudn an old thread which advised that it was possible to save an InDesign file as am RTF, open it in Word, save it as a .doc or .docx, then import the copy of the file into FM and FM would prompt to convert styles; I tried that and it worked... partly. Does anyone have tips on how to maybe edit the styles in InDesign (or Word?) so things like carriage returns, tabs, etc transfer over. And (dare I hope) nester styles? Thanks.

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    3 replies

    Community Expert
    July 13, 2022

    While you CAN import word files into FM and have FM map the Word styles to FM styles, there are a lot of other stuff that does not work very well. Tables, Cross references and special formatting like super/subscript etc.  If you are thinking of setting up a round tripping environment, you will need to do a lot of testing.

    Bjørn Smalbro - FrameMaker.dk
    Barb Binder
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    July 12, 2022

    And (dare I hope) nester styles?

    The only nested style that FrameMaker supports is assigning a character style to an auto-number. So no, unfortunately that's not going to happen.

     

    ~Barb

    ~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training
    Dave Creamer of IDEAS
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    July 12, 2022

    InDesign doesn't save the file as RTF, but can save text flows to RTF. So, depending on how the document was created, it could be simple or extremely difficult. 

     

    If you want the entire file converted, this is an old MIF-to-IDML service that might still be available:

    https://dtptools.com/product.asp?id=mfid

    You will have to contact the developer.

     

    Returns, tabs, and most features would be supported in the RTF and into InDesign. 

     

    David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)
    Be.eM
    Inspiring
    July 13, 2022

    David,

    the MIF-to-IDML service (or more precisely, the plugin to be used in Indesign) just works in one direction, and it does this quite well. However, it doesn't support getting files out of Indesign into Framemaker, which is the question here.

    Bernd

    Dave Creamer of IDEAS
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    July 13, 2022

    Thanks, @Be.eM . I was sundowning and got the workflow backwards...

     

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