Adding MIFs to books, and opening them as ASCII text

[David__D]

Hi, here are a couple of questions about working with MIF files in FrameMaker 12.

In the 'ADOBE FRAMEMAKER 12 MIF Reference" PDF, in Chpt. 2 (page 9), it says:

"If you use FrameMaker to edit a MIF file, you must prevent it from interpreting MIF statements when you open the

file by holding down a modifier key and clicking Open in the Open dialog box."  (in Windows, the Modifier Key is Control or Shift)... I can't seem to get this to work in Frame 12 - if I shift- or Control-click the File menu, it doesn't *have* an Open command. If I go via an Open dialog box, it doesn't take any notice of the shift or control key being held down. Is this broken in Frame 12, or am I doing it wrong?

Also, I am interested in adding MIF files to a book. (I'll tell you why in a minute but if I click the 'Add file' icon in the book pane, and select the MIF file and click open, I get a pop up dialogue saying:

"Add Non-Document File to Book:   

The file '<filename>.mif' is not in recognizable format.
Are you sure you want to add this file to '<bookname>.book'?"

I am not sure why it's generating this error - I can still click "Add" and it adds it OK and can open the MIF file fine. Is this a bug?

(It is a "<MIFFile 12.0>" generated from Frame12 itself, by the way).

The reason I am trying this is because I thought maybe I could install a copy of Frame12 on our software build server,

and check in my source files as MIFs. (Because they're ASCII files, the SVN version control will be able to show 'diffs' for my text changes).

The build server could then be scripted to run Frame from the command line, open the book with the MIF files, export them as CHMs and thus build our HTML Help during each nightly build, with the source all nicely under SVN source control.
... not sure if anyone has tried this before?

[David__D]

By the way, in the book's Add a file dialog, MIF is one of the file types present in the drop-down filter! So why it thinks they're not a valid file type to open, I have no clue.......

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Re: your server plan – that will probably violate your license

[David__D]

How so? I meant buying an *extra* Frame license and installing it on the build server. Nothing wrong with that, surely?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

“regular” FM isn’t licensed to be installed on a server – that’s why they have a FM Publishing Server version

[David__D]

Oh good grief!  /sulks off to read the smallprint/

[David__D]

Oh I see. Reading http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/legal/licenses-terms/pdf/Adobe%20Frame...  (the EULA for FM12 doesn't seem to be online...) I see that

"2.1.7.2 For clarification and without limitation, the foregoing does not permit Customer to install or

access (either directly or through commands, data, or instructions) the Software: ......

(e) for operations not initiated by an individual user (e.g., automated server processing)."

I guess that means I'm not allowed to install Frame on our build server and have it run from the command line by a script? 😕

The monthly cost to license FrameMaker Server to be run that way is about £488 (compared to £29 per month for Frame12). 
Ouch.

I'm not sure I'll be able to convince those holding the purse strings that this would make me 16 times more productive, as suggested by that price...

ANYWAYS,

that's not really what my initial question was about

[Bob_Niland]

> ... for operations not initiated by an individual user ...

If you are the only user, and you have a separate license for the 'bot copy, I don't see an obvious licensing problem.

I have seen historical reports that single-user FM would not install and/or would not run on Windows Server, so I'd certainly use a trial copy to test it before purchase.

I have no core insights on your basic problem of dealing with your content management system, other than that MIF may be a less than satisfactory solution for at least a couple of reasons:

1. To make any sense of a diff/change report from the CMS, one would have to be fluent in MIF.
2. MIF can contain a lot of essentially unreadable hex code, in huge blocks, that could change radically on minor edits, which would make finding ordinary plaintext and/or formatting changes quite a challenge. it would be easier to submit a PDF each time, and use Acrobat's compare to find changes.

[Arnis Gubins]

David,

Using the MIF for diffs also has more issues than some of the ones that Error mentioned. FM includes timestamps for a number of features such as cross-refs and may update some internal unique IDs that would chnge even if there are no functional text changes. SVN would pick up these deltas every time giving a lot of false hits to ignore. Search the Frameusers archive on using SVN and other repositories for more details on trying to use a programming tool for working ith FM files.

FM12 should open the MIF as a text file using the Shift-key  modifier, but I'm not able to check this out right now. Regardless, I would recommend using a good text editor over FM for editing MIF files. For just examing them,  download Graham Wideman's MIFBrowse utility.

[David__D]

Cheers for the replies, guys.

(And I can actually reply today, now that Adobe has deigned to fix Adobe ID logins, which were broken for the best part of a day! err... good thing they haven't switched to a cloud-based software model then, eh? )

I take the points above regarding the ease of using MIFs with SVN, but bear in mind I am currently checking in CHMs, which provide no diff ability whatsoever, do even if MIF were clunky it would still be an improvement.

But this is all academic as I can't afford a FrameMaker Server license anyways! So I won't be doing it.

In any case - this wasn't really meant to be a thread about using MIF with SVN,

it was to see whether Frame12 had bugs with opening MIFs and adding them to books.