Word/MathType to FrameMaker/MathML Equation

Question

Hello all,

I will be using unstructured FrameMaker 15.0.6.956 for the project below.

I am working on a document in Word that I will be moving to FrameMaker a little later in the process. (The original doc is in Word and there are multiple writers who are still working in the Word version using Master Docs.) The document is an engineering textbook that uses several hundred equations, for which MathType is used in the Word version. I will be moving it to FrameMaker for the ease of formatting, indexing, styles, cross-references, etc.

I have never used the MathML Equation feature in FrameMaker, but I see that it seems very similar to MathType--a kind of MathType for FrameMaker, maybe? Anyway, I am wondering if MathType will be importable into the FrameMaker doc. It doesn't seem to be copy/pastable, and I'm concerned that I may need to recreate every equation in the Frame version.

Thank you!

Nina

Bob_Niland · Accepted Answer

Isn't this something like the third time in the last 6 months that someone has asked about importing equations created in Word into FrameMaker?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my recollection is that we've found no way to do that other than as image files because Word does not save the equations out in an editable format.

re: …no way to do that other than as image files…

And that can be done with preservation of typographic quality. If the Word doc is available as a PDF, Illustrator can open single pages, isolate individual equations, deleting everything else, shrink the artboard to equation extents, and then save it as SVG. The SVG preserves the text as text and any non-text elements as vector art.

As you would need some way to organize them, and don't want to re-do all of them every time the .doc/x is revised, the equation instances ideally would have some separate and change-control stewardship already in place, that could be used in the saved file names and to ID those needing re-export.

denjohan1 · Answer

I'm considering migration from Word to FrameMaker for a 800+ page document with equations so I downloaded the 30-day trial version of FM. Layout-wise, importing docx to FM worked quite well but equations and inline symbols written in Word's equation editor (MathML) are completely missing. Although I could copy equations in Word as MathML and paste them into FM's built-in math editor (Math Flow), the logical fonts changed from Latin Modern (LM) Math to something else ("inherited"). In Math Flow I instead selected "System Font (deprecated)" but LM Math doesn't appear in the font menu, only LM Roman and LM Sans of the LM family. Even when selecting LM Roman, the equations appear at very low resolution on the screen. The resolution of the equations after saving as PDF is better than on the screen but it's still a bitmap, not SVG like the body text (also LM Roman). Another issue is that I will have to import inline symbols one-by-one via MathML, which is quite tedious. Importing equations and inline symbols as images (even SVG) is not acceptable because they are no longer editable. I was hoping to use FM for multi-channel publishing but it doesn't seem to work with the outdated (2010!) Math Flow. The FM manual says that MathML can be entered also as a DITA element but I have absolutely no experience from DITA so that'll take a while to learn.

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