🚀 go-pugleaf

In Article <tharpold-260294063433@ts3-56.upenn.edu>,
tharpold@mail.sas.upenn.edu (Terry Harpold) wrote:
>In article <djt2-230294174725@path22285.path.cwru.edu>, djt2@po.cwru.edu
>(Dennis J. Templeton) wrote:
>
>> Now I am considering a move to Framemaker 4 for the mac for it's page
>> layout capabilities. Is the new version of EndNote able to interface with
>> Framemaker like the Word plug in in this regard?
>
>-- No. EndNote Plus 1.3.x is "compatible" with FrameMaker's "mif" format:
>you have to save the FrameMaker file into mif, then apply EndNote to it,
>then reopen it in FrameMaker. Kinda kludgy, frankly. I've never tried it.
>
>Terry Harpold
>tharpold@mail.sas.upenn.edu

By the way, although the "kludgy" process described above works, Endnote
Plus 1.3 takes an _enormously_ long time to process the FrameMaker MIF file.
Even for a very short file (a few pages of text at most, and less than 20 or
so citations), it takes EndNote Plus about 5 minutes to scan the MIF file
for citations.  After that, producing the formatted file takes another 5
minutes or so (all of these times are very approximate, and they were
obtained on both a Powerbook 140 and a Mac IIsi).  You can safely say that
it takes an order of magnitude longer to process a file if it was prepared
with FrameMaker 3.01 or 4.0.  The first time I tried this process out using
my Powerbook, I was convinced that my Mac had crashed;  nothing seemed to be
happening.  On a Mac with a SCSI disk with a drive activity light, you can
see that EndNote is torturously processing the MIF file (flash, wait, wait,
flash, wait, wait, flash, ....).  The people at Niles have told me that this
is normal behavior.  If you look at a MIF file with a text editor (it is a
text only format) you will understand why things are taking a long time.

In addition, you have to be careful how you prepare your source file in
FrameMaker.  It helps to have a paragraph format (FM's paragraph style)
prepared with the name Bibliography in advance of making the MIF file.  If
you don't, the file returned by EndNote Plus will have one prepared for you
with a set of default settings.  Further, make sure that there is a blank
line at the end of the FM file.  EndNote Plus can process the MIF file even
if you do not follow this suggestion, but the MIF file produced as formatted
output by EndNote Plus will cause FM 4.0 (at least) to crash reproducibly
when you try to read in the MIF output file.

If you are considering switching to FM, be advised that version 4.0 is
really slow for text entry.  Combined with the torture described above, it
takes a long time to make final changes in a piece of work that needs
EndNote to process the citations and bibliography.  I think that the
combination of Word and EndNote Plus is superior;  if you need better page
formatting and typography than provided by Word (and who doesn't?), send the
processed output to PageMaker, for instance.  After a lot of experience with
FM, I've switched back to Word.


Warren F. Beck
Department of Chemistry
Vanderbilt University
beckwf@ctrvax.vanderbilt.edu