MIF generation

[Grzegorz]

Hi,

I hope this group is more alive then adobe.framemaker :)
I need to know some information about MIF. I want to write a tool to
prepare a catalogue in FrameMaker from data gathered in database
(MySQL) or HTML. Let's supposeit is a database with some information
about the elements that need to be put on pages.
For example I know that there is a table o values that should be
rendered using tahoma, 10pts, table borders are 1px, ... and table is
positioned Left:100px, Top: 250px on the page.

Is it possible to generate such MIF files that can be then imported to
FM?

I have tried to read something about MML, but AFAIK it does not have
many important possibilities.

Can You help me with this topic?
Thanks
Gregory

[Neil Gould]

Post by Grzegorz
Hi,
I hope this group is more alive then adobe.framemaker :)
I need to know some information about MIF. I want to write a tool to
prepare a catalogue in FrameMaker from data gathered in database
(MySQL) or HTML. Let's supposeit is a database with some information
about the elements that need to be put on pages.
For example I know that there is a table o values that should be
rendered using tahoma, 10pts, table borders are 1px, ... and table is
positioned Left:100px, Top: 250px on the page.
Is it possible to generate such MIF files that can be then imported to
FM?
I have tried to read something about MML, but AFAIK it does not have
many important possibilities.
Can You help me with this topic?

The short answer is that, yes, it is possible. However, it requires a good
understanding of MIF. Fortunately, there is a lot of information available
about the format, starting with the MIF manual.

General comments: you won't be working with pixels (I presume that's what
you mean by "px") for object positions, and while HTML is a structured
language, it is not a database file format, so you may have better luck
populating an FM table via MySQL.

Regards,

[Grzegorz]

Post by Neil Gould
The short answer is that, yes, it is possible. However, it requires a good
understanding of MIF. Fortunately, there is a lot of information available
about the format, starting with the MIF manual.
General comments: you won't be working with pixels (I presume that's what
you mean by "px") for object positions, and while HTML is a structured
language, it is not a database file format, so you may have better luck
populating an FM table via MySQL.

How hard do You think it is to learn and understand MIF for a person
like me. I'm a programmer (mainly intranet businness solutions,
databases, windows apps, some knowlegde about computer graphics).
I'm standing in front of such problem - customer wants me to write a
generator for his catalog that is normally in a database and presented
on WWW. He wants it to look just like the WWW catalog but to be
prepared for printing.
How much time can it take me to learn MIF and do it?

Thanks
Gregory

[James Owens]

Post by Grzegorz
How hard do You think it is to learn and understand MIF for a person
like me. I'm a programmer (mainly intranet businness solutions,
databases, windows apps, some knowlegde about computer graphics).
I'm standing in front of such problem - customer wants me to write a
generator for his catalog that is normally in a database and presented
on WWW. He wants it to look just like the WWW catalog but to be
prepared for printing.
How much time can it take me to learn MIF and do it?

In my experience, MIF is not that hard to learn. I'm not a programmer, but
I have written fairly advanced utilities in AutoLISP, dBASE, BASIC, and
REXX. I've worked with MIF to convert some Ventura documents to
FrameMaker (using a REXX program).

For MIF, a lot of the work is done for you. You start by using ordinary
FrameMaker to define the page layouts, tags, table formats, and so on that
you're going to need. To do gthis you have to know FrameMaker.

Then you export this blank document to a MIF file. It becomes your "stub";
you start with the stub and add content.

Adding content is just a matter of generating correctly tagged lines of
text and appending them to the file. To add a paragraph, for example,
you might send the following lines:

<Para
<Paraline
<String `This is a paragraph.'>
It's a little more complicated than that at imes, but if you've programmed
before, you should have no trouble.

The MIF Reference PDF included with the FrameMaker files is comprehensive
and well-written, and will help you figure out how to create the lines of
text you need. You can also "hack" by creating what you want to see using
FrameMaker, exporting to MIF, and studying the output. By mimicking the
output, you can achieve the same effect.

A word of caution: building a MIF from scratch is much easier than
analyzing an existing MIF file created by Framemaker from a complex document.

I have some MIF processing programs written in REXX. They include
comments You're welcome to look at them if you want.

--
"For it is only of the new one grows tired. Of the old one never tires."
-- Kierkegaard, _Repetition_

James Owens, Ottawa, Canada

[o***@grafik.3d.pl]

Thanks very much for Your reply! It helped a lot.

Post by James Owens
I have some MIF processing programs written in REXX. They include
comments You're welcome to look at them if you want.

Could You send some examples to: obgc ( @ ) grafik 3d pl

Thanks again
Grzegorz

[James Owens]

Post by o***@grafik.3d.pl
Thanks very much for Your reply! It helped a lot.

The other replies that appeared recently will also be helpful. MIF is a
markup language, not a programming language. I'm not sure it's
object-oriented, but as generated by Framemaker it certainly isn't
linear. Things are, indeed, stored "all over the place," or so it seems.

When I spoke of a "stub" earlier, I should have called it a "template" --
that's what Adobe calls it. The technique for including template files is
described on page 52 of the 1997 _MIF Reference_. I think this is the best
way to do what you want, as long as you know Framemaker. If you don't know
how to set up a document in Framemaker, make sure you have at least three
weeks to figure it out (unless the client is willing to set up a template
for you and explain how you can use it to create your document.)





--
"For it is only of the new one grows tired. Of the old one never tires."
-- Kierkegaard, _Repetition_

James Owens, Ottawa, Canada

[j***@square1.nl]

Shouldn't the original poster be looking into products like Miramo and,
IIRC, Patternstream, that specialize in database publishing through
FrameMaker?

[o***@grafik.3d.pl]

The "original poster" :) is looking into existing products but he wants
first to try to do it himself - to learn and to earn :)
Of course I'm considering using such products, but I'm not sure if
they'll fit to customers requirements. Hopefully this task is not for
yesterday - I still have some time to find the best way to solve the
problem.
Another thing is the price - I'm afaid that out-of-box solutions will
be too expensive for my customer. As You can see I'm from Poland and
our market is not that rich (yet!) :)

Thanks for all the replies,suggestions and explanations. I didn't
expect so many useful posts.
Thanks again.
Grzegorz

[Neil Gould]

Post by Grzegorz

Post by Neil Gould
The short answer is that, yes, it is possible. However, it requires
a good understanding of MIF. Fortunately, there is a lot of
information available about the format, starting with the MIF manual.
General comments: you won't be working with pixels (I presume that's
what you mean by "px") for object positions, and while HTML is a
structured language, it is not a database file format, so you may
have better luck populating an FM table via MySQL.

How hard do You think it is to learn and understand MIF for a person
like me. I'm a programmer (mainly intranet businness solutions,
databases, windows apps, some knowlegde about computer graphics).
I'm standing in front of such problem - customer wants me to write a
generator for his catalog that is normally in a database and presented
on WWW. He wants it to look just like the WWW catalog but to be
prepared for printing.

As you're a programmer, much of what you'll see in a MIF will be
understandable. The structure shares some practices with other structured
languages, such as SGML, but expands on the concept in ways that are not
obvious.

Post by Grzegorz
How much time can it take me to learn MIF and do it?

The learning curve will be related to the complexity of your layout.
Besides the basic "dos and don'ts" that must be learned, there are many
possible structural components. "Catalogs" are pretty broad in terms of
their structure and presentation, so I don't know how one could assess the
difficulty without having an example in-hand.

A solid understanding of Framemaker is important to this task as well.
When I undertake such a job, I let Framemaker do a lot of the work by
creating the first generations of the catalog as a Framemaker document.
I'd start the programming interface only after all of the style components
are completely defined and the usage is solidified.

Regards,

[Thomas Michanek]

Post by Grzegorz
How hard do You think it is to learn and understand MIF for a person
like me. I'm a programmer (mainly intranet businness solutions,
databases, windows apps, some knowlegde about computer graphics).

MIF is nothing like a programming language. It's a fairly advanced and
complex markup language, which is interpreted by FrameMaker.
That's one of the problems with experimenting with MIF; if you don't
follow the "rules" in the MIF spec, you don't know what the result is.

Another thing that's difficult to grasp in the beginning is the notion
of "inheritance" used in MIF. Basically, if you don't specify a value
that FM expects or needs, the value is inherited from other objects,
in a non-intuitive way.

These are normally only issues if you try to change or augment MIF
code written by FM, which is what I've been doing for the most part.
If you write a document from scratch, that would be much easier.

MIF doesn't describe a document like HTML describes a web page.
MIF is somewhat object-oriented, with different things described in
different places in the MIF file, and then linked together using
references. A few pages of an FM document with page headers/footers,
tables, anchored frames, imported graphics, added text frames, etc.
can be quite a challenge to "un-nest" in MIF. Things look like
they're stored all over the place, when you first look at it.

Being a programmer, you'll figure it out, but it's not "linear".

[Gordon Sande]

Post by Grzegorz
Hi,
I hope this group is more alive then adobe.framemaker :)

Try the FrameUsers mailing list which often has 30+ items per day.
Some lists cross post with a newsgroup but not that one. I have a vague
memory that at one time it did but that it was not totally reliable.

The mailing list is about to change manager with everyone thankful for
the outgoing help and hoping for continued success.

Post by Grzegorz
I need to know some information about MIF. I want to write a tool to
prepare a catalogue in FrameMaker from data gathered in database
(MySQL) or HTML. Let's supposeit is a database with some information
about the elements that need to be put on pages.
For example I know that there is a table o values that should be
rendered using tahoma, 10pts, table borders are 1px, ... and table is
positioned Left:100px, Top: 250px on the page.
Is it possible to generate such MIF files that can be then imported to
FM?
I have tried to read something about MML, but AFAIK it does not have
many important possibilities.
Can You help me with this topic?
Thanks
Gregory

[Ken Benson]

Post by Gordon Sande
Try the FrameUsers mailing list which often has 30+ items per day.
Some lists cross post with a newsgroup but not that one. I have a vague
memory that at one time it did but that it was not totally reliable.

You can also try the Adobe Forums
(http://www.adobe.com/support/forums/main.html), which are also somewhat
more active than this group. They can be accessed via a newsreader if you
don't like the web interface.

Ken Benson

[Gordon Sande]

Post by Ken Benson

Post by Gordon Sande
Try the FrameUsers mailing list which often has 30+ items per day.
Some lists cross post with a newsgroup but not that one. I have a vague
memory that at one time it did but that it was not totally reliable.

I have been told by a private email that the FrameUser mailing list is
also available as a newsgroup from the FrameUser host.

It does not seem to be picked up by the usual ISP collection of many
thousands of newsgroups which include c.t.frame.

Post by Ken Benson
You can also try the Adobe Forums
(http://www.adobe.com/support/forums/main.html), which are also somewhat
more active than this group. They can be accessed via a newsreader if you
don't like the web interface.

My local ISP seems to offer the Adobe newsgroups. I expect it is a case
of squeaky wheels getting the grease. When I asked them to get the new
groups after one commercial source reorganized it took a couple days
for them to catch up. I had sent an email to the support address with
the new details and got a thank you saying the details were being sent
to the news manager. That part of their system actually works!

Post by Ken Benson
Ken Benson

[Christoph Nahr]

On Wed, 25 May 2005 19:05:22 GMT, Gordon Sande

Post by Gordon Sande
My local ISP seems to offer the Adobe newsgroups. I expect it is a case
of squeaky wheels getting the grease. When I asked them to get the new
groups after one commercial source reorganized it took a couple days
for them to catch up. I had sent an email to the support address with
the new details and got a thank you saying the details were being sent
to the news manager. That part of their system actually works!

Don't bother with your local ISP, just subscribe directly to the Adobe
newsserver. The URL of the NNTP server is www.adobeforums.com. You
have to register and log in with a password.

Note: this *is* an NNTP server even though it doesn't have "nntp" in
the name. If you access it with your browser you'll get
auto-redirected to Adobe's website.

[Gordon Sande]

Post by Christoph Nahr
On Wed, 25 May 2005 19:05:22 GMT, Gordon Sande

Post by Gordon Sande
My local ISP seems to offer the Adobe newsgroups. I expect it is a case
of squeaky wheels getting the grease. When I asked them to get the new
groups after one commercial source reorganized it took a couple days
for them to catch up. I had sent an email to the support address with
the new details and got a thank you saying the details were being sent
to the news manager. That part of their system actually works!

Don't bother with your local ISP, just subscribe directly to the Adobe
newsserver. The URL of the NNTP server is www.adobeforums.com. You
have to register and log in with a password.

A common problem with vendor news hosts is their slow response. If my
local ISP has it with fast response then it is a nobrainer to go with
low fuss fast response service. Low fuss includes no password as my
IP address identifies me as one of their customers.

The private email I got pointing out that FrameUsers offered a newsgroup
directly include considerable grumbling about its poor response and long
delays in getting lists of posting. Poor response on the internet has
many possible causes but why tempt fate (and contribute to long haul
congestion as well). Adobe has a large customer base so it is not
unreasonable to expect a serious ISP to carry their newsgroups. The same
would to apply to a specialized program with (say) 300 users total.

Post by Christoph Nahr
Note: this *is* an NNTP server even though it doesn't have "nntp" in
the name. If you access it with your browser you'll get
auto-redirected to Adobe's website.

[Grzegorz]

Thanks for all the answers. I'll try the mailing list and the news.
Gregory.