Re: 2-way filter between Quark and MIF -- first test

[Lindsey Thomas Martin <lmartin@xxxxxx>]

At 10:59 AM -0700 27/8/2001, Dan Emory wrote:
>Has anyone used the Goldwein MIF filter II product (price $99 US) 
>that integrates with the Quark Express environment? It purports to 
>work both ways--exporting quark files to MIF, and importing MIF 
>files into Quark, preserving page layouts, tables, styles, etc. in 
>both directions.

I have made a quick test of MIF filter in both directions.

(1) From an FM6 document (928kb) of 150 pages with 54 tables but no 
cross-refs, conditional text and so on. Conversion was 
straightforward -- save the document as MIF and open from within 
XPress -- but took some time and I had to increase the memory 
assigned to XPress. The resulting document is usable but would 
require some cleaning up. It is also very large (3.3MB); I suspect 
that this is because the cells of the tables are each converted to a 
separate text block. All styles came across but leading, character 
formats and fonts were not converted perfectly.

(2) From an XPress document (64kb) of 8 pages of text only. Again, 
conversion was straightforward -- in XPress choose Utilities > Export 
as MIF and open the MIF file with FM. Conversion of text seemed 
better in this direction and all styles imported correctly. One 
problem I noted: headers and footers were placed on the document 
pages and not on the master pages.

My initial assessment: useful if one needs to move a document started 
in one application to the other for completion; one would not want to 
be moving the documents back and forth many times. It would be very 
useful in a workflow in which one did the editing and tagging in 
FrameMaker and the final typesetting in XPress, though it looks as if 
an FM document with a lot of tables would be very cumbersome to 
handle when converted to XPress.

Hope this helps. Dan (or anyone else), if you would like the 
conversion of particular features tested, let me know or, better, 
send me a little file to test.

LTM
-- 
Lindsey Thomas Martin
lmartin@sfu.ca / 604.215.9490

Publications, The Fraser Institute
4th floor, 1770 Burrard Street
Vancouver BC V6J 3G7 Canada
lindseym@fraserinstitute.ca
tel 604.688.0221 x584 / fax 604.688.8539
web http://www.fraserinstitute.ca

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