🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi John, 

I can't do much better of an explanation than Tim Murray. 
With respect to Kathy Garvey's suggestion, I have never tried it, but it feels like a worthwhile strategy.  
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Before I forget, as mentioned by others, be sure to make a backup before doing anything. 

Maybe even two copies on separate media, and check them. Ie. open them an navigate them. Last week I made a copy, and two days later, I found it was not "complete". Fortunately I had another "good" copy. 

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Is it possible you could convince the Powers That Be that a "new" version of the 900 page document with simpler formatting would be more modern and elegant, then just follow Tim Murray's suggestion - change everything to Body, and then judiciously create/apply a limited number of elegant, functional paragraph tags which easily allow HTML and PDF versions? 

Returning to Acrobat ... List of ... and PDF Setup .... List of can be found on the Menu bar, Add > List of > .... It creates lists of "things" in your documents. 

I was thinking of the appearance of the document. Ie. using Acrobat to preserve a copy of the appearance of the document, plus a kind of map of it's structure and formatting. 

Assume I have files named Chap1.fm, Chap2.fm and Chap3.fm. Assume each Chap?.fm has identical paragraph tags - ChapterTitle, Heading1 and Heading2, where each chapter contains multiple Heading1's and each Heading1 contains multiple Heading2's. Ignore overrides for the time being. 

PDF Setup and Acrobat Batch Sequence "List all Bookmarks" allow me to create a list of ChapterTitle, Heading1 and Heading2. I don't know how to do this kind of extraction in FrameMaker. So I use Acrobat. It's like an outline collapsed to only show the top three levels. 

(Note: I find this easier than reformatting and regenerating my TOC, table of contents file.) 

In FrameMaker, I would do a File > Save As  ... select PDF, enter a filename, click [Save], and when the PDF Setup box opened, I would map the paragraph tags so that ChapterTitle contains Heading1 and Heading1 contains Heading2. 

After the creating the PDF, in Acrobat the bookmark hierarchy will reflect this structuring. Now, using the Batch Sequence, List All Bookmarks, I can create a list to print. With the printed list, I would then look up each instance of the paragraph tags in the PDF ... just to see if they were the same. If they are the same, some of my override concerns are resolved. 

I thought any technique which might help you distill (as in extract) the primary structure of your document (as reflected in the main paragraph tags) would help. It's where I would start. 
Brian