How to save MIF 12.0 from FM 2015?

[Rsfl]

Hi,

we switched from FrameMaker 12 to the version 2015 and I noticed that I can only save the MIF formats 7.0 and 2015, but not the format MIF 12.0 that was used by FM12. Am I missing anything? Is MIF 2015 identical to 12.0 and just renamed?

We use MIF for localization and I have the impression that switching to MIF 2015 has drastically decreased the number of matches, which would make sense if the TM was established with a different MIF 1.0 format.

Robert

[Barb Binder]

See if Stefan's answer in this thread is helpful:

FrameMaker-2015-Documents save as MIF 9, 11 or 13 ?

[Bob_Niland]

re: noticed that I can only save the MIF formats 7.0 and 2015,

Any older FM can open any newer MIF. Any markups not supported in the older version are ignored. Not your situation, but a potentially big problem is trying to open MIF8 or later in FM7 or earlier, due to Unicode (which came in with FM8).

In your specific case, as long as you are only using FM12 vintage and older features in FM2015, FM12 should open MIF2015 with zero issues and no loss of content.

What's really interesting is that FM2015 can save as MIF7.

That sort-of implies that Adobe is doing "something" in that case to back-convert at least some Unicode to FrameRoman. My guess is that this might be limited to FM special characters. Back-converting arbitrary usertext codepoints above U+00FF would be daunting (Character Formats and overlay font name invocations would have to be synthesized and applied) - and is basically impossible to cover at 100% as Unicode now has a growing number of new glyphs that never existed in any legacy overlay fonts.

[Rsfl]

Thanks for the ideas. So if the TM really has no import filter for MIF2015 then we have to install FM12 somewere and do the backwards conversion as you pointed out.

We did not use any particular new FM2015 features. I assume it would work out to just open the MIF 2015 files in FM12 and save them as MIF12 files.

[Stefan Gentz]

We use MIF for localization and I have the impression that switching to MIF 2015 has drastically decreased the number of matches, which would make sense if the TM was established with a different MIF 1.0 format.

There should be no decrease in the number of matches just by switching from MIF12 to MIF 2015, as there were only changes in the MIF format that do not affect the CAT Tool filters.

All the latest releases of SDL Trados Studio, Across, memoQ, Star Transit and Wordfast support FrameMaker (2015 release). So, my suggestion is to check with your LSP which CAT tool they are using and in which version and make sure they update to the latest version of their tool.

Another temporary workaround (or better: "hack") could be to "fake" the MIF version statement in the MIF files, so that an older CAT tool version that supports only FrameMaker 12, will still process the MIF 2015 files. I have tested this with an older version of SDL Trados Studio (2011) and a bunch of complex FrameMaker 2015 files and did not find any problem. However, this is of course not an "official" solution and just a "hack" – use at your own risk. The only "official" recommendation I can give you is, of course, to update your CAT Tool to a version that supports FrameMaker 2015.

Here you go with a list of MIF statements:

<MIFFile 8.00>

<MIFFile 9.00>

<MIFFile 10.0>

<MIFFile 11.0>

<MIFFile 12.0>

<MIFFile 2015>

Please note that the newer versions of CAT tools which support FrameMaker 2015, might support also the new Right-To-Left support and languages introduced in FrameMaker (2015 release) like Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Thai. They usually also set the paragraph / character style language setting in the MIF and might change also the text direction attribute. However, this is only important if you have your western language MIF files translated into Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew or Thai.