Saving FrameMaker 9 document to Frame 7.1

[Mayside81]

Is this possible? Can I get a plug in or something to help me accomplish this? Any insight would be appreciated.

[Art_Campbell1]

Yes.

SaveAs any MIF version and you're good.

Remember that all unicode characters will be dropped coming and going....

Art Campbell

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[Mayside81]

What exactly are unicode characters? When I opened the .mif file in 7 I still had my bullets

& trademark symbols.

Is there a way I can save the .mif file back to a .fm 7 file?

[Art_Campbell1]

Unicode characters are a way of rendering upper-order ASCII characters, such as diacriticals, so that the information can be read by an international audience. Frame 7 used an internal scheme for bullets and such; FM 8 adopted the international standard.

Wander over to wikipedia for more.

To save a MIF file as an .FM file, you'd select SaveAs > FM.

Art

[Mayside81]

The save as doesn't work as it doesn't allow me to save as a "document" format.

I was able to just change the file extension in explorer to .fm, and the file opens and initially seems ok, could this pose any problems you think?

[Art Campbell]

SaveAs certainly allows you to save as a Frame file, the only native FM binary document format.

In passing, there's no great difference in the amount of information saved by the .fm binary format and the MIF -- the difference is which features are supported by whatever release you're running. Saving a FM 9 file as MIF, opening it in 7, and saving as a 7 FM file changes the character set information, as already noted, and throws away any 9-level data that 7 doesn't recognize.

Short answer is it's probably past time for you to upgrade to 10... or 9 if that's what's in use.

[Van Kurtz]

Mayside,

The save as doesn't work as it doesn't allow me to save as a "document" format.

It is one of FrameMaker's quirks. Simply delete the .mif from the end of the file name and select Document from the dropdown list. It will save the mif file to binary fm.

Changing the extension from mif to fm in Windows Explorer does NOT change a mif file to binary fm. It DOES force Windows to use FrameMaker to open the file. When FrameMaker opens the file (still a mif file), it converts it to binary fm. When you go to save it, FrameMaker is happy.