Comments on: Converting MIF to XML – Java Version

By: Marcel

Marcel — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:14:25 +0000

I am able to process a large mif file. Next question is how to transform this to docbook5.

Are there xsl examples available to do that? My document includes both framemaker drawings as well as equations.

By: Basav

Basav — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 07:13:43 +0000

Oh..okay I got it..! I was using java 1.4. I’m able to run it through Java 1.6..!

thanks,
Basav

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 15:05:58 +0000

@another Andrew - I haven't looked into OOo XML enough to say how difficult it would be to convert the MIF XML to a readable OOo document. I'm guessing it would be a bit of a challenge but you might start with looking at a few posts here which describe one use case of converting MIF XML to DocBook and back again. You could possibly even try doing MIF XML -> DocBook -> OOo.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 14:54:33 +0000

@Venkat – It’s difficult to diagnose the problem without seeing the MIF file. If you’re still having issues send me a copy of the MIF file you’re trying to convert and I’ll take a look.

By: another Andrew

another Andrew — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 16:55:47 +0000

Andrew,

This looks very interesting. I was given an assignment of converting portions of framemaker documents into openoffice. However, I know virtually nothing of xml, which is not good. How feasible would it be to translate the above generated xml into OOo readable xml?

Thank you,

Another Andrew

By: Venkat

Venkat — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:45:23 +0000

Hi Andrew,

Thank for your reply, the problem is solved, but it’s not printing xml string, i am getting some specila character like….

#%v
=EndInset
]]>.
can you help on this…

thank you

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:08:34 +0000

@venkat - I've released a new version which should fix the error your getting. You can download the latest version (0.3) here. If you're still getting errors with the latest version let me know and I'll try and get them fixed up.

By: venkat

venkat — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:08:22 +0000

Hi Andrew,

nice, clean work! This looks very importent to me, because part of my work involves handling of FrameMaker legacy documents.

One question: I get an exception with version 0.2

7.0H
Unexpected exception: 255
java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: 255
at org.qnot.mif2xml.MifLexer.yylex(MifLexer.java:600)
at org.qnot.mif2xml.Main.main(Main.java:33)
All the best at your new job!

Can you help on this..
thank you

By: aeb

aeb — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 15:02:21 +0000

@IH.. Thanks for the feedback. The XML output from mif2xml seems to work best when you want to process MIF using XML technologies like XSLT/XQuery or xml processing libraries in your favorite programming language. The xml is quite ugly but it has the advantage of round tripping back into raw MIF for use with FrameMaker again. I haven’t exhaustively tested mif2xml so I’m sure there’s a few bugs. Most of the issues that come up have been with parsing facet data and embedded TIFF/EPS objects. mif2xml was written using FrameMaker 7.0 as a reference and I haven’t looked into how much has changed in 8.0. I tested a few FrameMaker 8.0 files and things to see to work ok.

I haven’t really given much thought to external entities. One possible way to handle them might be to add some command line options to mif2xml so that the external entity references get added to the resulting XML. Something along the
lines of:

$ mif2xml –doctype /path/to/dtd

Which would output something like:

Regarding character sets, mif2xml doesn’t explicitly tell Java which encoding to use so when reading/writing files Java will use the platform’s default encoding. This should work as expected unless you attempt to process a MIF file that was created on another platform using a different encoding. I could add another command line switch for defining a specific encoding to use when reading/writing MIF files which may help in that case. The latest version of mif2xml (0.3) which you can download here, has some bug fixes (reported by @Jyothi) and should do a better job with facet data and MIF 8.0 Unicode files.

I’d love to hear any other feedback you may have or any ideas for new features.

–Andrew

By: IH

IH — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:39:51 +0000

Hi Andrew,

Thank you for the conversion script. I have been playing with fm8 and its xml output. It seems to me that the fm xml output outputs the data but is a lossy conversion and doesn’t really do a good job with formating data where as your xml converter will keep everything from the mif to xml in a lossless conversion.

Have you found any cases that mif2xml does not work in? How would external entity references (I think you can do these in frame) be handled. What about character sets?

Regards,