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Miftran Users Guide: 1 Overview

Overview

Miftran is a configurable translation program designed to translate Framemaker MIF (Maker Interchange Format) files into other text formats. By providing a customized ini tialization (or `rc') file, you can convert any MIF file into another useful text format. In particular, miftran has been designed to be able to produce reasonable HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) text files. In the rest of this document, the output is assumed to be HTML. If you plan on producing a format other than HTML, replace the word `HTML' in the remainder of this document with the name of the output format you are producing.

Note : This document is used as a sample MIF file to be run through miftran, as well as being a real manual that describes how to use the program. Thus there may be gra tuitous use of formatting controls and cross-references. This is intended to better demonstrate the capabilities and use of miftran.

The translation process is based upon the paragraph and font tags used in your MIF docu ment. Your rc file specifies how those tags are to be translated into HTML. The configura tion information in the rc file also includes input and output filenames and various other control information.

For each document that you want to process, you will have to create an rc file which defines how the paragraph and font tags in that document are to be translated into HTML tags. This may take a couple of hours the first time you do it, but once you have your rc file you can continue to edit your MIF file and rerun miftran to get updated HTML files with no further work. If you have multiple documents that use the same set of paragraph tags, you can use the same rc file if it does not include the input filename, or you can copy your existing rc file for the new document, make the few changes required, and be ready to process the new document in a few minutes. For recommentations on how to set up your environment in which to do the translation, see Section 2.1, `Requirements' on page 4 .

1.1 The Translation Process

The translation process reads the MIF file and transforms it through the following steps:

By default, miftran will process the input file through all of these stages. For debugging purposes, you can give it a command line option (such as -tran) which will cause it to out put the text after that stage of processing, allowing you to see better what's going on.

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