FM+sgml 5.5 convert to rtf, preserve paratags

[Guest]

Tearing my hair out, can anyone help...

I know this is possible, I achieved a very good result back in April after a fairly brief search of the internet for a method. It was so easy I didn't feel the need to record the method, or where I found the advice. Yes, I KNOW how stupid that was.

I am at work, so no possibility of updating software or using Mif2go. Not sure that Mif2go would work on such primitive files anyway. I am using FM+SGML 5.5 to create unstructured files arranged in a book file. I need to convert these files, individually or as a book, to rtf, preserving as much as possible of the formatting.

I seem to recall Acrobat Distiller being involved in the process I used before. I still have the resulting file, which has retained all the paratags. I think I had to tweak the para definitions and replace the headers and footers. Cross references are missing. I have had no luck recreating the method, or finding it again on the internet.

Any help gratefully received.

Ruth

[FieryPantone]

It's been a while since I used 5.5, but later versions of FM already offer Save as .rtf – I guess that isn't the case with 5.5, or you wouldn't have asked.

If it's only the output formatting you want to preserve, you could try Save as .pdf and then use Acrobat File > Save as > More options > RTF

Saving the tagging for re-use elsewhere is more challenging; I think I've used File > Save as html a few times, because the results take slightly less cleaning up than xml.