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Deb Sauer
Deb Sauer
Inspiring
August 29, 2020
Répondu

Embedded images corrupted when updating to FM 2019

Hi all,

I'm converting a bunch of files from FM 8 to FM 2019. When I open the FM 8 files in FM 2019, the images that were imported and copied into the FM 8 files are corrupted and appear as gray boxes in FM 2019. I don't have the source image files to import by reference into FM 2019, so I really need the images to survive the conversion to FM 8. Any suggestions? (PS The images that were imported by reference are fine, of course. The paths are retained.)

Thanks!

    Ce sujet a été fermé aux réponses.
    Meilleure réponse par Deb Sauer

    Thanks, Rick and Bob. I appreciate the speedy replies. I didn't open the files again for a few days and, oddly enough, when I did, the missing images were there! I don't know if this was a memory caching issue or what. I'm converting about 50 books for this client, so I may run into this issue again and your recovery tips may come in handy.

     

    FWIW, I never embed images; I always import by reference (it's been a best practice since I started using FM in 1994). I have some previous tech writer at this client to thank for this and a lot of other bad practices. Cleaning it up keeps me pretty busy!

    2 commentaires

    Bob_Niland
    Bob_Niland
    Community Expert
    August 31, 2020

    If you still have FM8 available (or any later version that opens the files without damage), Rick's MIF solution is worth a try.

     

    If nothing else works (been there, done that), and PDFs of the documents exist, the images can {usually} be recovered, in their as-published state, from PDF by various means, such as export-images in Acrobat Pro, or deconstruction page-by-page in Illustrator (where you need to capture callouts & such).

     

    For people who haven't been bitten by this (usually by their forebears), there are of course a couple of stewardship lessons:

    1. Never embed images. Use import-by-reference, and include some (perhaps author-only) metadata on what each image is and where sourced from. If managment insists on embed, create a local ./images/ dir and put local copies there.
    2. When tying the ribbon at project release, always re-save each .fm and .book file as .MIF. You never know what version (perhaps at outside translation) will try to open them.
    Deb Sauer
    Deb SauerAuteurRéponse
    Inspiring
    August 31, 2020

    Thanks, Rick and Bob. I appreciate the speedy replies. I didn't open the files again for a few days and, oddly enough, when I did, the missing images were there! I don't know if this was a memory caching issue or what. I'm converting about 50 books for this client, so I may run into this issue again and your recovery tips may come in handy.

     

    FWIW, I never embed images; I always import by reference (it's been a best practice since I started using FM in 1994). I have some previous tech writer at this client to thank for this and a lot of other bad practices. Cleaning it up keeps me pretty busy!

    frameexpert
    frameexpert
    Community Expert
    August 29, 2020

    The only suggestion I have would be to run a script in FrameMaker 8 to export the images from FrameMaker to disk. You would have to use FrameScript, since ExtendScript wasn't added to FrameMaker until version 10. Then you could use a script to import the images back into the FrameMaker 2019 documents, preferably by reference.

     

    One other thing you might try: save the FrameMaker 8 files to MIF and then open the resulting MIF files with FrameMaker 2019. I am not sure this will make a difference, but it is worth a try.

     

    If you want to explore the scripting solution, please contact me offlist: rick at frameexpert dot com

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