34.6 Supporting document review in Word
Mif2Go converts FrameMaker documents to Word, but Mif2Go does not convert Word documents to FrameMaker (see §6.1 Converting to Word: a one-way street). However, in an environment where writers use FrameMaker and everyone else uses Word, you can still create a workable review process in which reviewers get to work in Word, which they already know how to use, and writers maintain the documents in FrameMaker:
1. Create a FrameMaker conversion template (see §2.4 Importing formats from a conversion template) to make converted documents look almost the same in Word as they look in FrameMaker.
2. Create a Word template with macros set up to turn on revision tracking automatically whenever anyone opens a converted document.
3. Use Mif2Go to convert FrameMaker documents to RTF.
4. Place the converted documents where your reviewers can access them; probably on a network drive.
5. Allow reviewers time to edit the documents in Word. Any changes they make show up in color. Word not only tracks the changes, but also shows who made them, so if you have questions you can contact the author.
6. When reviewers are finished, use Paste Special in FrameMaker for plain-text (not RTF) copy/paste, to incorporate Word changes into the original FrameMaker document. Pasting as plain text will save you endless grief from the (mostly invisible) artifacts that are retained in your FrameMaker file when you use RTF import.
7. Use Mif2Go to convert the updated FrameMaker documents to RTF again, so reviewers can open the converted documents in Word and see the results.
Do not attempt to “round-trip” an edited Word document back into FrameMaker; in most cases the clean-up time and cost would far exceed the time and cost to insert edits by hand in FrameMaker. Problems might not be visible immediately, but then will surface when you are in final production. For example, applying to the reimported document a template that changes character properties of paragraph formats might appear not to work at all, because a character format was silently added to all default-format text. Even when changes are extensive, it is best to use copy and paste as plain text, one FrameMaker paragraph at a time.
See §6 Converting to print RTF.
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