How to Save and Open a Framemaker File Using Other Software

Even though you wrote a document using FrameMaker, you can still open it using other software applications such as Microsoft Word or using a Web browser. The following steps will tell you how to save a FrameMaker file (.fm) to use as an .rtf file (Microsoft Word), a .pdf file (Acrobat reader), a .txt file (Notepad or Wordpad) or a .html file (any Web browser).

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• FrameMaker software
• Adobe Acrobat software

FrameMaker and Microsoft Word

1. Open the FrameMaker file within your FrameMaker application.
2. Go to the "File" pulldown menu and choose the "Save As" option. This will bring up a "Save Document" window.
3. Add the file extension of .rtf after your name prefix in the "File Name" field of the "Save Document" window.
4. Choose "Microsoft RTF" in the "Save As Type" pulldown menu and click the "Save" button. Your file (with the .rtf extension) will get saved in that same directory and can be opened using Microsoft Word.

FrameMaker and Adobe Acrobat Reader

5. Open the FrameMaker file within your FrameMaker application.
6. Go to the "File" pulldown menu and choose the "Save As" option. This will bring up a "Save Document" window.
7. Add the file extension of .pdf (Portable Document Format) after your name prefix in the "File Name" field of the "Save Document" window.
8. Choose "PDF" in the "Save As Type" pulldown menu and click the "Save" button. The "PDF Setup" window comes up.
9. Choose "Generate PDF Bookmarks" under the "Bookmarks" tab and then include the paragraph tags in your FrameMaker file that you also want in your PDF file by moving them from the "Don't Include" to the "Include Paragraphs" column, or vice versa.
10. Select the "Articles" checkbox, also under the "Bookmarks" tab, and choose either "Thread by Text" frame or "Thread by Column."
    
11. Choose the "Structure" tab in the "PDF Setup" window and you can include or not include options such as header, footer, footnote or other features that were in your FrameMaker file. In this "Structure" tab, the "Generate Logical PDF Structure" will be set to "On" by default.
    
    
12. Choose the "Document Info" tab and you can type in the necessary information into the "Author," "Title," "Subject," and "Keywords" fields.
13. Choose the "Links" tab. This setting is turned to "Off" by default and is recommended. But, if you will be adding links to your PDF document from other documents after the PDF is generated, you need to turn the setting of "Create Named Destinations for All Paragraphs" to "On."
14. Make sure that the paragraph tags and other options you selected in the "PDF Setup" window are what you want in your PDF file because none of the changes can be undone.
    Click the "Set" button in the "PDF Setup" window. Your .pdf file will get saved in that same directory and can be opened using Adobe Acrobat Reader.

FrameMaker and Notepad or Wordpad

15. Open the FrameMaker file within your FrameMaker application.
16. Go to the "File" pulldown menu and choose the "Save As" option. This will bring up a "Save Document" window.
17. Add the file extension of .txt after your name prefix in the "File Name" field of the "Save Document" window.
18. Choose the "Text Only" option in the "Save As Type" pulldown menu and click the "Save" button.
    
    
19. When the "Save As Text" window appears, there are a few things to do:
    a) Choose either "At the End of Each Line" or "Only Between Paragraph," based on whether you want to add a carriage return.
    b) Choose whether you want the text from the table to be included as "Row By Row" or "Column By Column" and whether you want the table cell separators to be tabs or carriage returns if your FrameMaker file has tables.
    c) Choose the "Encoding" option as ASCII or ANSI (Windows), ISO Latin-1 (UNIX), Macintosh or any other options depending on your application and operating system.
20. Click "Save" in the "Save As Text" window. Your .txt file is saved in that same directory and can be opened using your Notepad, Wordpad or any other text editor applications.

FrameMaker and Web Browser Applications

21. Open the FrameMaker file within your FrameMaker application.
22. Go to the "File" pulldown menu and choose the "Save As" option. This will bring up a "Save Document" window.
23. Add the file extension of .htm after your name prefix in the "File Name" field of the "Save Document" window.
24. Choose the "HTML" option in the "Save As Type" pulldown menu and click the "Save" button.
    Your .htm file then gets saved in that same directory and can be opened with any Web browser such as Internet Explorer or Netscape.
    

Tips & Warnings

• RTF means Rich Text Format and Microsoft Word can open a file having either an .rtf or a .doc extension. Instead of following the above steps, you had saved the file within FrameMaker as a .mif file (Maker Interchange Format), Microsoft Word can still open the .mif file. But some formatting features may be lost.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader can open any file with a .pdf extension.
• Generally, all the paragraphs tags in your FrameMaker file will already be included. But, if you don't want to see some tags in your Adobe Acrobat file, make sure not to include them in Step 5.
• You may get a warning when you save. For example, you may get a "FrameMaker" window stating: "Paragraph tag ct chapter title is not in the Paragraph Catalog. Add it?" Click "Yes" or "No." Similarly, you will get warnings for each of the other paragraph tags. Click "Yes" if you want to add these paragraph tags to the Paragraph Catalog.

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