Framemaker 2019 WebP Image Import

[tech 27]

Hi There,

Currently, our company is planning to upgrade our FM 11 to FM 19 or FM 20. The challenge we foresee with this upgrade is pertaining to images that we have in our existing FM11 documentation. We mostly have images with .jpg, .jpeg, and .png formats

These images are nearly 50+ (approx). Now, what we want to know is if we upgrade to FM19 or FM20 and use WebP Image import feature, how can we plan for .jpg to WebP conversion?

From my knowledge of FM, I understand that FM19 or FM20 won't be able to convert .jpg to WebP and since this is company documentation, so we don't want to rely on online converting tools either.

Can anyone suggest me quick fixes or workarounds to tackle this scenario?

I will appreciate your help !

[Stefan Gentz]

Hm … maybe there is a misunderstanding?

You can continue to use your existing JPEG and PNG in FrameMaker 2019/2020. FM 2019 and 2020 both fully support JPEG and PNG images.

The support for WebP in FM 2019/2020 is an additional supported image format.

If you consider converting your existing images to WebP, you can do that with Adobe PhotoShop with the WebP plugin (for more details, see here).

[tech 27]

Stefan, Thanks for your respone. 

Maybe, I wrote it other way round. We are thinking of converting our existing .jpg images to WebP and use WebP import option.

Apart from Photoshop, can you suggest any other workaround?

[Stefan Gentz]

I did a little bit of googling and found this: https://anywebp.com/software.html

But I have not tested it myself.

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

Converting JPG to any other format won't "undo" the lossy compression already applied to the image.

The JPG is likely the best representation of your images unless you have uncompressed versions of them that you can save to WebP, or can reproduce the images directly as WebP.

[Bob_Niland]

Tech 24: Now, what we want to know is if we upgrade to FM19 or FM20 and use WebP Image import feature, how can we plan for .jpg to WebP conversion?

What's the work-flow here?
WebP only appears to make sense for FM→HTML/XML
(and maybe eBook, but not PDF or print),
and then only if the WebP can be passed-through unmodified (as SVG can, for example).

Stefan: The support for WebP in FM 2019/2020 is an additional supported image format.

I'm impressed that FM already supports WebP import. Even Photoshop still requires a 3rd-party plug-in to support it. But in a casual test of FM Publish to Responsive HTML5, a test image was converted to Jpeg (I can't imagine what happens to any alpha channel data). I don't quickly find any STS menu option with alternatives. I suspect output to PDF also involves a conversion.

WebP is a proprietary Google format, and thus not something I'd consider for an enterprise image convention, until support is much more pervasive.

[K.Daube]

Sorry - my post was wrong - there is no delete function in this forum!