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If this happens when you've saved the MIF to FM and then rebuilt the
book explicitly usingONLY the FM* then you've got some kind of serious
bug or perhaps a rogue plug-in (or plug-in setting, or script)
regarding file saving. I've never, ever seen Frame 'force' a FM file to
save as MIF *and* be changed to MIF in the BOOK file from which it was
opened.
And it's your symptoms around saving that make me suspect a plug-in;
frex, one designed toconvert all FM to MIF and all FM references to MIF
so that the file set can be checked into a plain-text-diffing CVS
(i.e., so that only the *deltas* are saved in the CVS version-tracker
database, not a brand-new binary FM file every check-in).
If you aren't running any such plug-ins, and if this is sudden
behaviorr (i.e., it hasn't always done this and only now do you want to
take control) then I'd look at rebuilding my working system from the OS
up. A day of careful application installation beats a wek of banging
your head on file manipulations and blind setting stabs.
Maybe someone with a lot of plug-in or script experience could look at
your maker.ini and some other files typically changed by a plug-in, to
see where to start hunting a specific culprit...?
HTH;
David
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: FrameMaker book hauntings
From: Ken Poshedly <[1]poshedly -at- bellsouth -dot- net>
Date: Fri, February 13, 2015 2:21 pm
To: TECHWR-L Writing <[2]techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Excuse me for posting a FrameMaker query here, but whomever runs that
list has it set so that my questions (as infrequent as they are) don't
appear for sometimes several days. (Yet I've never posted anything
inappropriate or outlandish.) Anyway . . .
We're running FrameMaker 11.0 on Windows 7 platforms and are having
problems with one -- and ONLY one -- particular book.
The problem is that when adding the eight or so FM files to build this
one particular book, FM recognizes most of the files as mif files and
prompts me with a pop-up window advising me that the file . . .
"is not in recognizable format. Are you sure you want to add this file
to (the book file)?"
The Add, Don't Add and Cancel buttons appear directly below, so I click
"Add", and it take f-o-r-e-v-e-r but does finally load the book
chapter.
In the book file, the accompanying icon is the letter "M" instead of
"Fm" (like it usually is).
And this doesn't happen with all of the book chapters either, and is
inconsistent with which chapters it "plays" with.
So what I do is open a so-called "mif" chapter in the book file, then
do a "save-as" to "fm" format (which I know it already is), then delete
the "mif" file from the book and re-import it as an "fm" file. Most of
the time it works and the newly imported section displays and remains
as "fm". But sometimes, even that doesn't work.
And if I do any edits in that chapter and save it again, the icon for
that chapter might "miraculously" change to an "m" in the book window.
Sheesh!!
Note that in Windows Explorer, all of the files in their actual folder
are honest-to-goodness FrameMaker files and not mif files.
So is this a bug in FM 11? We don't have this problem with any other FM
files or books and have been successfully using FM for many years
(myself, since 1998 with FM 5.5).
What gives?
-- Ken in Atlanta
References
1. mailto:poshedly -at- bellsouth -dot- net
2. mailto:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
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