What do I loose when I save in MIF?

[auslaender]

Hi,

I am returning to FrameMaker after many years of using a different tool, and have a question about MIF.  We are going to start using git to do software and documentation versioning.  I am well acquainted with git and think that it is a very powerful tool.  But the power comes when you are saving text files. You can then to diffs and merging and all that great stuff.  So I loose a lot of git functionality if I save my documents in fm format.

So I'm wondering if I could just save all the documents in MIF and never use fm.  Are there any gotchas here?  Any reason why this would not be a good idea?

Thanks for any insight you have!

[Bob_Niland · Accepted solution]

Unless a preference item has been added in newer FMs, making MIF your standard requires Save-As/yes-overwrite/OK every time.

If books are involved, there might be issues with adding MIFs to a book.

The fact that MIF is plaintext, and can be diff'd isn't as neat as it seems, because it would require ninja fluency in MIF to be able to make sense of a diff report.

Being able to unroll changes is another matter, but I'd expect any modern CMS to be able to do that with binaries (like .FMs).

Saving as MIF (in addition to .fm and .book) is great stewardship (esp. for export), but I'm not sure it's a win for day-to-day ops. Saving as both works, but is extra work.

[Winfried Reng]

I remember that Jeremy Grittith, the creator of Mif2Go, had tried to do this.

However, he also gave up as MIF has too many formatting info which changes which each tiny change in the document.

See some of his e-mails:

http://www.freeframers.org/archive/02/msg00540.html

http://www.freeframers.org/archive/05/msg00271.html

Jeremy Grittith died in 2014, and his tool Mif2Go works only partially with FrameMaker 13 or 14. With these versions Mif2Go can only convert to MIF.

http://mif2go.com/