Re: Frame to Word (summary)

["Gallagher, Susan" <sgallagher -at- STARBASECORP -dot- COM>]

Cathy wonders how to convert Frame documents to Word, and Linda answers...


>At our last FrameMaker meeting, Sarah Clayton, the Dallas Frame Technology
>Manager told us about a new software package that converts Word documents
to
>Frame and Frame documents to Word.  The name of this package is Word for
>Word which retails for $ 149.  According to Sarah, it is available through
>local resellers such as CompUSA, Software Spectrum, etc.

>The word of mouth is that this is a good conversion package but since I
have
>not bought it or used it, I have no personal knowledge.

I used Word for Word to do the very same thing -- convert Frame 4.0 to Word
6.0 -- and the conversion is far from seamless. For example, the conversion
will only change fonts once per paragraph (I dunno why), so bulleted
paragraphs are all printed in symbol font. It's been a while, so I don't
remember all the problems I had, but that was one of the biggies.

It's still far better than going the .rtf route. Frame .rtf isn't really
compatible with Word .rtf at all. Some very bizzar things happen to the
stuff on master and references pages during the conversion. I suppose if you
wrote some macros to clean up the files, W4W wouldn't be too bad.

MasterSoft, the company that produces Word for Word, was just bought
recently by a major software player (forget who). Maybe they've come out
with a new version that's ironed out some of the kinks.

****************************************************
Sue Gallagher
StarBase Corp, Irvine CA
sgallagher -at- starbasecorp -dot- com
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