"persistence of memory" – .mif vs .fm

[Guest]

FM 9.0p250, XP

Just happened to notice that a .pdf I'd made of a single chapter was displaying unexpected properties in Windows Explorer … in case this was going to be something I needed to updated through the book, I saved all the components as .mif and went to take a look. Indeed, several of the components showed incorrect information under PDFDocInfo; my fault, due to careless duplication of files a long time ago. Updated the information in the .mif, saved, opened the .mif in FrameMaker, File > File Info … and there was the old information still!

Given the need to finish the task, I bit the bullet and opened all the components as .fm so I could fill in the file info through the dialogue box instead. If anyone can shed any light on the unexpected behaviour of the source-files, though, it would be interesting.

[Arnis Gubins]

Niels,

Within FM, the File > File Info dialogue displays what is defined in the DocFileInfo entries (encoded as packets of XMP data in the MIF and hence uneditable). The PDFDocInfo fields and the DocFIleInfo fields are related, yet independent. They are separate entities in the MIF. Editing the PDFDocInfo content would have inserted the correct info into the generated PDF.

This is all described in gory detail in the MIF Reference manual starting on p.84.

[Guest]

Well, well, well … I'd assumed that anything exposed to a text editor by converting to mif was fair game updated and brought back into the .fm file. I shall sit down quietly with the relevant pages of the mif manual, and know what to do to update these properties from now on.

Thanks!