John,
My limited experience is that when there are equations and
references to sections/chapters and so on - I have not had
a lot of luck in going from one format to another -
(my personal preference has been latex/pdflatex and
tth/hevea or latex2html for html conversion)
I would be happy to attempt some clean-up of latex or even
lyx documentation - (even the most recent windoze version
of lyx had some difficulty with some of my latex files -
need to pursue that angle carefully) (no experience with
framemaker)
On Wed, 8 Feb 2006, John Pye wrote:
Hi all,
Can anyone offer any comments on what would be the 'safest path' for
converting Framemaker files into Docbook Lyx files?
I have the exported 'MIF' and 'XML' files from Framemaker version 5. I also
have the original .fm5 files, and I have the PDFs that were generated by
Framemaker. This is some old user's documentation for a project that I'm
working on: the documents have embedded images and equations, multi-page
line-numbered code listings, an index, marginal notes, footnotes, and
cross-references between sections, tables, equations, etc. Also tabular text,
bold, italic and 'typewriter' code. It has 'parts', 'chapters' and then two
or three levels of sub-headings.
I've already written a hacky XSLT-based transformation from the
Framemaker-exported XML files direct to LyX document format using an XSLT
transformation, but I found that I just couldn't make LyX do anything
sensible with the <lyxtabular> tags that I generated - the lyx format seemed
to be so sensitive to whitespace. And I recently received updated original
Framemaker files, and I don't want to have to re-do all the hand-tweaking
that I did to make this approach work. Also, framemaker's exported XML
doesn't seem to contain *all* of the original structure of the framemaker
document.
If I'm to use existing tools, it seems that mif2xml then a homemade XSLT to
transform to HTML, then...?
I ultimately want to be able to export docbook and then generate online
documentation for GNOME and windows, as well as PDFs, as per
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeDocUtilsMigrationHowTo
and also Microsoft CHM format
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Compressed_HTML_Help
Any suggestions?
Would I have more luck trying this with new new 1.4 version?
Cheers
JP
PS the document's I'm trying to transform are actually these:
http://ascend.cheme.cmu.edu/pdfhelp.htm
for which the source material is at
https://pse.cheme.cmu.edu/svn-view/ascend/documentation/trunk/mif/?rev=338
