convert framemaker to indesign

[pelles43964538]

Anyone who knows how to convert frame maker to indesign

/Pelle

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

IIRC, there's no direct path - you'll need to go via some intermediate route like FM to PDF, PDF to ID or FM to RTF, RTF to ID; or just copy and paste content from one to the other & fix up formatting afterwards.

[Bob_Niland]

If the FM document is structured, or otherwise suitable for XML export, that might be an easier path.

[uakinci]

I'm reading the book "A Designer's Guide to Adobe InDesign and XML" by James Maivald (with Cathy Palmer) and it sounds like exporting from structured FM as XML and then importing that same XML into InDesign should be possible. However, what does that do to formatting? I have a feeling formatting is usually the hard part in any XML operation, no?

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

The Save as XML and HTML are pretty limited.

Fm 2017 has a Publish option for Basic HTML that I suspect would be a much better option.

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

To follow on Bob's thought, you can use HTML as the export fomat.

[Stefan Gentz]

You might also want to have a look at DTP Tools - MIF Filter for Adobe InDesign

It's a little bit old and was not updated for quite some time, but it's worth a try. The XML route is an option, but you will run into a serious amount of work including XSLT programming as XML in InDesign is a quite "demanding" thing. I just say: Tables!

So, the question is of course: Why do you want to do this? For use cases in technical documentation, FrameMaker is the preferred tool of choice.

[Barb Binder]

Hi pelles43964538:

As someone who uses both InDesign and FrameMaker on a daily basis and is a career instructor on both applications, I'd steer you to the RTF route.

I'd recommend focusing on getting the text cleanly out of FrameMaker (ideally any images are already linked so therefore accessible to InDesign in their project folder). From there, I'd start fresh in InDesign—create a new InDesign file (or start with a template) and place the text and images.

These two layout applications from Adobe are very different, and do not offer an equivalent feature set. Starting over in InDesign will allow you to take advantage of all the InDesign features not found in FrameMaker—nested styles, linked master pages, high-end type controls, and oh, so much more.

While I agree with Stefan that FrameMaker is the tool of choice for technical documentation, I am seeing more and more of my past FrameMaker students coming to my InDesign classes for this specific workflow. Their offices have made the decision to move everyone to the Creative Cloud, and now they have to figure out how to make the best of this new workflow.

~Barb

[Marina E. Michaels]

I agree with Barb about the move to FrameMaker. I used FrameMaker intensively, every day, from version 2 to version 7.2, writing a few hundred software manuals. I loved FrameMaker.

Then I earned Adobe Certification in InDesign (from Cyndi Reese, who was at the time the second-top-ranked Adobe instructor in the world--she was awesome!), and I never looked back.

Now, even for software documentation, I greatly prefer InDesign. (As a professional indexer, I find InDesign much faster and easier to index than FrameMaker, even counting the various plugins I used with FrameMaker.)

I came to this thread because I have a personal project that's in FrameMaker 7.2 that I want to port over to InDesign. I'm going the RTF route, as Barb recommends (thanks, Barb!), then am going to create a fresh design in InDesign.

[julesg95866794]

I decided to go another way. I tested DTP and was not impressed by the result. And XML export and import, like all other formats, let the software decide how to treat everything and not treat in many cases. So I exported the FrameMaker documents to MIF and wrote a Perl script to convert MIF into IDML which I import into InDesign. This way I get pretty close to 100% conversion of everything. What is missing is what FrameMaker does not export to MIF.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Not sure what you mean about FM not exporting to MIF - you can Save As MIF in FM!

[julesg95866794]

You are right, it has been a while that I meant to reply to this post, and my memory is not what it was... I exported FM to XML and then converted the XML to IDML.