RE: Word to Framemaker

["Fred Ridder" <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

Thanks for the kind words, Keith.

I'm afraid I can't provide much specific help on the macros.
When our group made the jump from Word to FrameMaker
we were still using Word 95, which used Word Basic as its
macro language. As of Word 97, Word Basic became obsolete
and was replaced by Visual Basic for Applications, or VBA.
(In fact, one of the reasons we converted to FrameMaker was
that many of the Word Basic macros we relied on in our complex
Word templates broke when converted to VBA, and since the
author of most of those macros was no longer in our group we
had a problem if we wanted to continue using Word for our
tech pubs.)  I've never become half as competent writing
Word macros in VBA as I was in Word Basic. But I can tell you
that there are several good books available on VBA development
in general and Word macro programming in specific. And the
online help for VBA is a pretty solid reference source.

One of the other macros I used on all the documents I converted
bascically converted all the Word style names to new style names
that I had pre-defined (and pre-formatted) in my FrameMaker
templates. Then when I imported the Word doc, I chose the
option to reformat using the current document's (the template's)
styles. After the import operation, I was able to use CudSpan's
"Hunt Overrides" plug-in to find every imported paragraph that
had a tag that wasn't in the template's catalog so that I could
manually retag them. Of course this approach only works if the
Word document had a proper stylesheet and if the writer(s)
actually used it rigorously rather than doing a lot of ad hoc
formatting and creating dozens of different variations on Normal.

The other approach I *could* have taken would have been to
import the docs with the Word styles and then use a FrameScript
scipt (such as the one in Rick Quatro's Super Web Bundle) to
map the Word tags to FrameMaker tags. But for a variety of
reasons I found that it was better to do as much of the clean-up
and retagging as early in the process as possible so that I
simply wasn't bringing a lot of baggage and garbage into the
FrameMaker environment. Basically, I wanted to make the
converted almost as clean as if they had been created in
FrameMaker in the first place.

My opinions only; I don't speak for Intel.
Fred Ridder
Intel
parsipany, NJ