Importing WORD doc into FM12

Report · Mar 22, 2015

When importing a WORD doc with multichapters into FM12, do I need to seperate the WORD doc according to the chapters first then do the importing?

Report · Mar 22, 2015

FM will import the entire Word document into a single file. So, if you want the chapters to be in separate FM files, you can either split the Word document first or split the FM document afterwards.

Report · Mar 23, 2015

Most of the time, I'd import the complete Word file into a single FrameMaker file – that makes it a lot easier to do all the necessary cleaning up! and once your FM file is respectable, you can thoughtfully break it into chapters.

Report · Apr 14, 2015

I would say it depends:

If your word document satisfies any or all of these conditions:

1. It is short

2. It utilizes few fonts

3. It does not contain graphics with text flowing around them

4. It has a few basic styles

5. It is "clean": no spurious font usage, no "bleeding italic"

then by all means, open it in FM

Otherwise, you might want to follow the process below. In my case, I have a novel I wrote in Word. It's 147,000 words long, uses several fonts and images. I opened the file into FM and it was not able to process it appropriately. Luckily, no harm was done but I'd recommend you do backup your word file first.

Here is what I did:

1. I created an FM template from scratch.

2. I used my template to import the first chapter only. In so doing, I refined the various tags ( I am assuming you are importing you word document as an unstructured framemaker doc) and created a few character tags such as "emphasis" for fragments which are emphasized and "thought" for fragments of text representing thoughts in characters' heads. These character tags are important for the editing process because by changing say the color or the size of the font for these characters tag, I can quickly highlight them and verify them. In the end, there was no portion of my text that did not have an explicitly assigned character tag, which is truly important for the quality of the text.

3. I ran a find on "character override". Since my novel was being edited by two editors, there were quite a few overridden punctuation utilizing the wrong font, or face or size.

4. I would then refresh the book to ensure the chapter numbering and page numbering was working correctly.

5. Once I was satisfied with a chapter, I would import the tags back into the template and move on to the next.

I am skipping the work I did on the preamble (first and second titles, copyright notice, acknowledgment, dedication, table of content, maps) and postamble (glossary and "about the author") but the process was the same.

This process took me about two days to complete. In the end, I ended up with the following

1. A robust template I can use for the successive books I am publishing

2. A cleaner text, easier to typeset and check

3. A greater understanding of the way FM works.

Hope this helps