Converting from FrameMaker to Confluence 4

[Phil Pinder]

Last year I built a system to convert FrameMaker files to WIKI Markup files using the WIKI Markup Notation Guide. Now that there's a great new editor that uses XHTML instead of WIKI Markup, please may we have an XHTML Notation Guide?

I would be very happy to have this for a number of reasons:

1. I could convert directly to XHTML instead of the rather dodgy WIKI Markup.
2. Hopefully I would no longer have to unmerge all merged table cells (not supported in WIKI Markup).
3. If I have to continue converting to the intermediate WIKI Markup format, I will have no easy means of testing if a conversion problem is my convertor's fault, or a glitch with your WIKI Markup-to-XHTML conversion.

Also, I need to repeatedly convert about 5000 A4 pages until the company decides to go live with the Confuence WIKI.

Many thanks for any information

Phil

[Robert Lauriston]

I've got MIF2Go exporting XML,now wiith Arsenale's Invisible Ink plugin I can paste it directly into Confluence 4.1:

https://plugins.atlassian.com/plugin/details/918877

Maybe not the ideal solution if you have thousands of pages to convert.

[Robert Lauriston]

WebWorks Designer has added support for Confluence 4, but for my purposes it's not very useful. It looks fine, but when you edit a page the code is an uneditable mess of macros and whatnot.

It would be fine for read-only publishing but not for a one-time migration.

[Robert Lauriston]

Have you voted for the "Create and document an XSD / DTD for Confluence markup" issue?

https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONF-24884

[Graham Hannington]

See my attempt at CONF-24884.

[Robert Lauriston]

Have you looked at "Confluence XML-RPC and SOAP APIs"?

https://developer.atlassian.com/display/CONFDEV/Confluence+XML-RPC+and+SOAP+APIs

[Robert Lauriston]

Has Atlassian documented the 4.0 XHTML source format? Seems like partners such as WebWorks and K15T would need that to update their products. For that matter, Atlassian developers would need it internally to write the 3.x migration tools. So maybe the question is, do they plan to publish it, and if not, what hoops do we have to jump through to get our hands on it?

[Phil Pinder]

Hi Robert,

Nice to know I'm not the only one looking for a FrameMaker to Confluence solution!

We tried Frame to Word, and also Webworks ePublisher but weren't very impressed with the results. To export to WIKI Markup, I exported first from Frame to HTML, having customized the HTML Mapping tables in Frame's reference pages. I then built a massive HTML to WIKI Markup macro using FAR HTML which is a kind of user-friendly grep tool (among other things). Referenced graphics aside, it kind of works. At the moment it's at the stage of "OK for a one-off conversion followed by a lot of tidying up".

But my question still remains - surely we should be able to convert non-Confluence content directly to a version 4 Confluence file format (XHTML) just like we could for version 3 (WIKI Markup)?

[Robert Lauriston]

I've also been looking for some way to get thousands of pages of FrrameMaker source into Confluence 4 and so far have come up short.

1. I tried exporting to .rtf, but numbered lists in FrameMaker appear as bulleted lists in Confluence (because FrameMaker exports them as number-character bullets instead of SEQ fields).
2. Using MIF2Go to export to .rtf, Word to convert that to .docx, and Confluence's Word import works, except that the table of contents gets scrambled (OFFCONN-53), REF fields are not converted to links (OFFCONN-54), and SEQ fields are converted to plain text instead of ordered lists (OFFCON-56).
3. WebWorks ePublisher can export directly to Confluence, but it doesn't support 4.0 yet.
4. ePublisher can in theory export to MoinMoin or MediaWiki, which I could then import to Confluence using the Universal Wiki Converter, but I encountered technical problems and was not able to accomplish either export.