Interleaf Conversion

[Guest]

Greetings,

In case there are any old salts who recall Interleaf -

I'm working with some ancient files, I think they were recovered from the library at Alexandria, and must convert them from Interleaf to Frame somehow.

We find that many (most?) of the files will translate without difficulty, but for reasons we can't discern, others will not. An example is the parts manual I'm currently translating. Section A's cover and content translated fine, as did section B's, but section C's won't. Section A is larger than C and section B is smaller (perhaps C is in 'the zone'?). Other sections have trouble translating the cover, or the content, but not both.

I'm using Filtrix 4.0 to translate, going directly from resaved-to-ASCII files (.ildoc) to FrameMaker files (.mif).

I'm willing to go multi-step (I tried converting from one Interleaf versio to another first, but that failed, also), if I must.

Either way, I've got to get these FrameMaker capable.

Any ideas??

Thanks,

Solon Aquila

[peter minneapolis]

Hi, Solon:<br /><br />]'m working with some ancient files, I think they were recovered from the library at Alexandria<br /><br />Obviously, the Rosetta Stone wasn't included in the package<G>!<br /><br />Regards,<br /><br />Peter<br />___________________<br />Peter Gold<br />KnowHow ProServices

[_thomas_bro_]

FWIW.

I did have some problems last time I converted from Interleaf to FM unsing Filtrix. (Years ago) Sounds similar to what you describe.

My solution at the time was:

1) Create PDF's from Interleaf files

2) Convert PDF's to Word using a plugin, not Acrobat's own (There are a number of these around and some of them do save some sort of stylenaming. I cannot remember the name of the one I used at that time, but I'm sure you can find a suitable plugin.

3) The files are cleaned up in FM using Paragraph, Character and Table Tools from Silicon Graphics

An alternative is to save as RTF from PDF and then let FM decide what names to attach to the different 'styles' create by the RTF. This is often a lenghty process, but can be done.

You did state multi-step, so ...

keep smiling
thomas

[Greg32712301kn7o]

My solution at the time was: 1) Create PDF's from Interleaf files 
By @_thomas_bro_

How do we create PDFs from Interleaf files?

Thank you.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

I suspect you would use Interleaf to print to PDF or something like that.

[Greg32712301kn7o]

Yeah, that's the obvious solution.  But we don't have Interleaf and IT doesn't seem willing to buy a copy to convert a small handful of legacy files.

Does anybody know of a conversion tool for .IDU and .ILDOC files?

Thank you.

[frameexpert]

If you open the .idu or .ildoc files with a text editor--like Notepad++--do you see any intelligible content from the files that you could extract?

[Greg32712301kn7o]

Looking at one of each in Notepad++:

The .ILDOC contains a lot of readable !Class and !Master Frame, etc declarations, followed by readable instantiations and finally a fairly large text-numeric object.

The .IDU  contains a readable system attributes header (wundow declaration/initialization) followed by likely graphics goop.

The .IDU files are of most interest to us.

Thank you.

[frameexpert]

I am not familiar with these file types, but I thought it would be worth looking at them to see if you can copy/paste some text out of them.

[Guest]

Thomas,
This sounds pretty good, and I'm working through some of it.

I was goofing around last night and trimmed a 55 page file down to 4 pages and it converted pretty well. It seems that file size matters some (I still can't convert a 2M file that's only 2 pages - LOTS of layers!)

The problem is that to delete the pages, I had to go through and delete the content on each page, then go to the 'framebar'(?) on the side and highlight/delete all of the little components (They appear to be like attributes in Frame). I could highlight 5 and hit Delete, but only the top one would delete. That was a long, laborious process and the Help file didn't.. well.. help.

Do you know of a way to delete pages (preferably groups of them)?

I'm happy to open Interleaf and make 5 copies of the same, large file, then delete pages as needed to make 5 convertable files, but the deleting of components is killing me.

I'll check around for a good PDF - To - Word plug-in.

I WAS able to make a PostScript file out of the Interleaf file.. but Frame wouldn't import it. :-(

Solon