Comments on: FrameMaker Users Rejoice: MIF Filter Finally Released

By: Mike Perry

Mike Perry — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 16:05:51 +0000

Those who’ve been bothered by Adobe’s indifference toward FrameMaker, which seems to be lessening slightly lately, might want to check out a new Frame competitor, Blaze, from MadCap.

During October 2008, they’re offering a $200 competitive upgrade for FrameMaker users. For details, you can contact them at:

sales@madcapsoftware.com?

Make your subject line “Blaze Competitive Upgrade” to route it properly.

Since it’s Windows only, I’ve not demoed it, but from the specs it did strike me as being much more “modern” than FrameMaker. FrameMaker was a marvelous product when Frame owned it. But it hasn’t been kept up properly since then. And of course Adobe dropped the Mac version and never developed the Linux version beyond a beta.

By: John Callan

John Callan — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 10:43:39 +0000

Can anyone advise how this plug in treats Index markers originating in the FM files. Are they retained in the Indesign files using this plug in and can an Index be generated subsequently in Indesign using these markers?

By: Jared

Jared — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 17:29:14 +0000

This MIF filter sounds like it would help facilitate a migration from FrameMaker to InDesign and perhaps even occasionaly filtering to import content with formatting. Every time I’ve done a migration, there’s a lot left to be cleaned up and there is some experimentation to be done up front.

I’m curious how well the filter handles linking of images. If you have imported images by reference into your FrameMaker document, does the filter embed those or link them once it’s in InDesign?

I’m also curious what other advantages there are over, say, an XML export from FrameMaker to import into InDesign.

Thanks,

–Jared

Pasadena, California

By: David Blatner

David Blatner — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 05:07:46 +0000

Mohamed, can you give us more details on what did and didn’t work? My guess is that there is something specific to your files that is causing it trouble. I’ve heard from other people that it works extremely well.

The great thing about this plug-in is that it’s free for people to use. You only pay if you like the results and want to save it.

By: Mohamed Zeid

Mohamed Zeid — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 03:03:20 +0000

I have tested the plug-in and it really does NOT function properly and the quality of the converted documents is really poor. I am not sure if this is kind of a limitation on the trial version. I doubt it though.

By: Wa Veghel

Wa Veghel — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 23:34:05 +0000

He! We’ve been censored…

By: Jan Macuch

Jan Macuch — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:06:57 +0000

David, thanks for the nice words. As to the page credit concerns: There are many small studios which can only afford the plug-in when it returns the investment instantly (e.g. they buy 100 pages each time new job arrives) and even the largest of our customers would only need one license to migrate hundreds of thousands of documents. This way we can set the licensing to reflect the usage better than actual number of installations.

->>What happens 10 years from now when you might not be able to buy more credits but you still need the plug-in.
- We plan to be around a bit longer than that! And this kind of licensing will help us to keep the plug-in up to date for as long as users need it.