Re: Pagemaker to Framemaker conversion

[Chris <cud -at- telecable -dot- es>]

I seem to recall that PageMaker had a concept of tags for formatting - 
<fmtName> to indicate the formatting for a paragrapf of text (and maybe 
also text ranges???).  In that case, doesn't it also export text with 
these tags?  If so, then you may find a very close mapping between 
PageMaker and MML (a simple FrameMaker tagging language - see the Maker 
online docs for the MML reference).  If all this is possible, then it 
seems you could save each story to a text file, run a script to glom all 
the disconnected stories into a single file, then import that MML file 
into your FrameMaker template.  You also might be able to include MML 
commands that create unconnected pages for the individual files, if 
that's what you require...  Either that, or include a marker that you 
can easily find to break up the flows once again.  Or just import each 
separate file into an unconnected flow.

Two disclaimers - MML has not been updated since Maker added tables.  So 
if you have lots of tables in your PageMaker, you might be in trouble. 
However, you can convert a selection of delimited paragraphs into a 
table very easily in FrameMaker.  Also, it has been centuries (in 
software years) since I worked with PageMaker.  Am I just barking at the 
moon here?