framemaker 7.0 consistently crashes when saving files as .rtf (and other related issues)

[mt_mz_]

Thank you first of all for any help from anyone.  Secondly, I apologize for any of my FrameMaker naivety, I am just a beginner with it really.

I am having a problem when saving out FrameMaker files to rtf format (for eventual conversion to word -- some people just want parts of book in word so they can mess around with it).  Frequently, framemaker crashes and gives me a message such as this below. What can I do to get our documents into word format?

secondly, when i get them into word format, sometimes I have this problem when paragraph marks are turned on in word -- people that have recieved the word files I send them have complained about this and unfortunately they are people I cannot tell to just turn off the paragraph marks.  Why is that repeated text inserted into the line? It should just say "Removing Constraints" (with no parenthesis marks).  Some of our chapters are very long and manually removing this is not applicable.

thanks for any help!

[MichaelKazlow]

What OS? What patch value/version number for FrameMaker 7.0

[AxialInfo]

If this RTF output will be an ongoing requirement, you might want to take a look at using the 3rd party utility "MIF2GO" from

http://www.omsys.com

to generate the output, instead of FM's built-in capabilities.

FM's built-in capabilities are *very* limited /  minimalist when it comes to controlling the output, and many folks find that using MIF2GO gives much better results. This applies to both RTF and to HTML output from FM.

If you're brand new to FM then MIF2Go can be a bit daunting to get a handle on, but in the long run it can generate much more reliable output than from within FM, and much faster.  For example, it's possible to create conversion templates contained in .ini files (text files) so that similar documents can be converted using a consistent group of MIF2Go settings, instead of needing to set up the output settings in every book or chapter as you would need to do using FM's built-in export.

The tech support from the folks at OmSys is topnotch, too.

[Arnis Gubins]

The only reliable way to get reasonable Word documents from FM is to use the mif2go tool from Omni Systems.

See: http://www.omsys.com/dcl/mif2gopg.htm

FM's RTF export filters have always been flakey as many objects in FM have no counterparts in the RTF/Word document formats. FM7.0 was the first version to use the Sangam filters for the RTF writers. These have been substantially improved through to v.9, but I still would recommend going with mif2go.

FWIW, your example simply shows FM's Index markers being inserted in the RTF file as Word index field codes. Unfortunately, Word's indexing doesn't have the same degree of index level support as FM, so it can't handle the multi-level permutations.

[AxialInfo]

About the {XE xxx} fields in your output file, that's the way FM converts index markers and their content when outputting RTF; FM automatically turns on the display of these fields. I believe it's the same with cross-references and all other kinds of marker output.

With MIF2Go you can specify what to do with each different type of marker, so you could choose to delete them completely if you wanted, or else to retain the markers but convert them to the correct index references in RTF. Here's the section in the MIF2Go manual about the markers:

http://www.omsys.com/dcl/usergd/rtfref_0120_5141_generating_an_index_in_word.htm#Xz105x557827

http://www.omsys.com/dcl/usergd/rtfref_0119_514_modifying_word_output_after_conversion.htm

I'm not sure whether MIF2Go has a way to control the actual display of these fields in the RTF or not, or whether that would need to be done by a vbscript after the RTF has been generated.

Sheila

[Be.eM]

As recommended, MIF2GO is the best solution. But there's something you could probably do to prevent FM from crashing:

In most cases, FM crashes on RTF export because of images contained in a file. So if you want to do a plain RTF export (without images), simply make a copy of your document and do a search for anchored frames and replace them by, e.g., the text <image>. Once all images are deleted, retry exporting an RTF. Should work quite smoothly now. And while you're at it, you can do the search/replace thing also for all kinds of markers that don't translate well to word, like index markers, XRef markers and so on, and replace them by nothing (i.e. delete them).

As already mentioned, make sure you do all these things to a COPY of your document

Bernd