5.8 Converting structured documents

Mif2Go can convert Structured FrameMaker documents. However, the conversion is based on paragraph and character formats, not on elements, so you must use distinct format names to get distinct effects in the output. Specify a different format in your FrameMaker EDD for each element type that needs to be visually distinct in the output, rather than using Body with overrides for everything. In other words, use the EDD to create exactly the sort of formatting used in unstructured files.

Overrides require font tags for HTML output

If you are converting to HTML and you are stuck with a one-format EDD, you can retain in the HTML most (but not all) of the overrides; however, you have to accomplish this with font tags and align attributes, which makes CSS pretty much useless for the resulting HTML.

Cross references rely on element attributes

Mif2Go supports cross references in Structured FrameMaker documents by relying on attributes of the referenced element, instead of on paragraphs and markers. To convert cross references in Structured FrameMaker files, by default Mif2Go uses the value of element attribute Id as the target for cross references, and recognizes elements with attribute Idref as references to element IDs. If your Structured FrameMaker files use attributes with other names for these purposes, you must tell Mif2Go what names to look for; otherwise the cross references Mif2Go generates will not work as expected.

To specify the names of cross-reference and element ID attributes in your Structured FrameMaker document:

[HTMLOptions] or [WordOptions]

; IDAttrName = name of structured-element ID attribute, default "Id"

IDAttrName = Id

; IDRefAttrName = name of structured-element cross-reference

; attribute, default "Idref"

IDRefAttrName = Idref

By default, Mif2Go does not use structure tags and attributes for any other purpose.

Map attributes to markers

To capture the values of other Structured FrameMaker attributes, you can map the attributes to FrameMaker markers. For example, if the linkref attributes in your Structured FrameMaker document contain names you want to use for HTML split files:

[AttributeMarkers]

; Structured FrameMaker attribute name = FrameMaker marker name

linkref = FileName

See §34.8.3 Using custom markers to name output files.

See also:

§29 Working with FrameMaker markers

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