Structured Framemaker, FDK and XML Blog

I’ve always been irked by the fact that Framemaker doesn’t actually primarily manage structured documents as XML– a legacy, I believed, of Frame’s long history as a non-structured documentation editor predating SGML and XML.

Some months back, when faced with a problem of batch processing title pages on a set of manuals, I thumped my head for several days against how to best perform the needed changes at the XML level and then to script converting XML back to Framemaker using only the FDK (sorry, no Framescript for me). Then someone reminded me that MIF was always an option… 

Once I moved to that level, I had my problem solved in a half hour. In the age of XML, manipulating MIF is, if anything, a little retro-tech– but sometimes it’s the best way, or even the only way. Perhaps I should have read this 2002 article about the many uses of MIF by Seraphim Larsen of the Silicon Valley chapter of the STC, that introduces readers to the flexibility provided by massaging MIF.

Have you ever wanted to check a large set of FrameMaker files to make sure all the borders, text- symbols, and rulers are turned off? What about hyperlinks? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to automatically validate all the hypertext links within a large set of FrameMaker files? Did you ever wish there was a way to automatically convert a set of data into FrameMaker tables? You can do all these things, and more, using the Maker Interchange Format (MIF).

This article presents some of the main features of MIF and gives an overview of some of the ways you can make use of MIF. Additional articles will delve deeper into using Perl to process MIF, providing details on specific applications.

I’m somewhat disappointed to see that it looks like no further articles materialized… but I can testify to the usefulness of MIF as a way to search and manipulate Framemaker documents programmatically without worrying about converting to XML and back. I’ve written tools to do things like filter out unwanted conditional text and unused variables at the MIF level… really not that hard once you get your head around the basics of the format. And Adobe provides decent (if not 100% accurate) documentation for the MIF format– providing an open native document format of the sort that Microsoft, for example, would never give you…

Anyway. Always remember that MIF is an option.