Is Framemaker 15 backwards compatible with 10?

[DawnLawien]

I have FM15 on one computer and FM9 on another. My client has FM10. Can I save back from 15 to 10? Or should I use FM9?

[Bob_Niland]

FM15 can save binary (.fm) only to FM15 and FM14 (if it's like earlier FMs).

Any FM can also save as MIF (.mif), which can be read by any prior or later FM, but any features later than the opening version will be ignored. In the specific case, sending an FM15 MIF to FM10, any FM15 features will be ignored by FM10.

You could use your FM9, but then you won't be able to use any FM10 features.

[Stefan-Gentz]

The best would be of course, if both you and your client update to FrameMaker 2017 🙂

Beside that: Unless you do not use the extended multilingual support in FM 2015 for right-to-left and script languages and just work with existing files from your customer, you should be safe using the MIF route.

[Bob_Niland]

Stefan: The best would be of course, if both you and your client update to FrameMaker 2017 🙂

Unless the FM10 client is on a Windows platform that isn't supported for FM2017, or they're just really conservative - FM10 works for what they need, and they don't want to chance changes/bugs in later versions.

I worked in a shop stuck on FM7.1/Solaris, FM6 at some divisions (they've probably been forced onto Windows by now, thanks to Oracle and PTC). Our archive process, for sending source out to translators routinely included MIF generation, because we never knew what the translation shop had (and we were sending a strong hint that we wanted MIF back too).

For future/other searches turning up this thread, I might add that crossing the FM7-8 boundary, with or without MIF, can present intractable [non-Adobe] portability issues due to Unicode - but that's not on the table in this thread's scenario.