A. Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter here.
Perhaps it's not quite that bad. But after you've explored these options, you'll appreciate my candor and honesty, and you'll understand why I'm feeling a bit bitter.
There are four options for converting Frame to HTMl in a Unix
environment, none of which quite do what you want:
TOM,
fm2html,
htmllite, and
cyberleaf.
1. TOM
TOM is John Ockerbloom's thesis project, available through the web
at http://tom.cs.cmu.edu/ or by
using the netconvert program.
TOM is fairly nice, and you should give it a try. It hasn't been
very successful with converting Frame documents in my experience, but
it fails in a polite enough way that you aren't terribly likely to
want to scream. You probably won't sacrifice much time by trying TOM.
2. fm2html
fm2html successfully converted Frame documents for me
when I was using Frame 3. As far as I can tell, it does not exist
and/or does not work for documents created using Frame 4 or higher.
fm2html works thus: You invoke it with
fm2html <document>at the Unix shell. It runs a great deal of things as a batch program, and finally spits out an <document>.html file and a bunch of GIFs corresponding to figures and equations in your document.
It also spits out a <document>.htags file. This file specifies the mapping between Frame styles and HTML markup that fm2html uses to make the conversion. You'll want to edit this file to reflect your preferences. I don't remember the format of the file, but it was somewhat commented, so it's reasonably straightforward to edit by hand. (It might be the case that there are two levels of mapping that are specified, one from Frame styles to fm2html styles, and then one from fm2html styles to HTML tags. I can't quite remember.)
After editing the .htags file, run fm2html again.
In my experience, this produced decent output; I was satisfied.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work with Frame 4 and up.
3. HTML Lite
Frame 4 has nothing like fm2html that I know of.
Frame 5 provides HTML Lite, a stripped-down version of a much more expensive translation package that we don't have here at CMU as far as I know.
The major way in which it's stripped down is that it doesn't handle pictures, tables, equations. Bleah.
To use HTML Lite:
Fire up Frame 5, and open your document.
From the File Menu, go to the Utilities submenu and choose 'HTML Mappings'. HTML Lite will take its own sweet time to start up, but oh well.
This menu item brings up a dialog box to let you specify mappings between Frame styles and HTML mappings, only without the informative comments for the .htags file that fm2html used, and without fm2html's attempt to pick defaults that wouldn't be wholly unacceptable to a blind and dyspeptic hedgehog.
To use this dialog box, you select the style from the big list, and then select an HTML mapping from the 'HTML Mapping' selection box at the upper right.
The selection box that HTML Lite uses is highly nonstandard, so I will explain how it works and attempt to spare you some of my frustration. To select something from the list of possibilities, you must do this:
From the 'FrameMaker Style' box, you can select 'Paragraph Styles' and 'Character Styles'. These basically do what you expect, even though the selection thingamajig doesn't.
You can click on 'Help' to wander through a maze of Frame documents to try to find out how these HTML Mappings are actually implemented in HTML tags, if you want to know more. The 'More Info' button just leads to WebWorks hype, and will only be frustrating if you're attempting to get something done.
Once you're done picking your mappings, dismiss the dialog box with the Done button. Then choose File->Utilities->HTML Convert. This will write out an HTML version of the file in the same directory as the original document.
If (and only if) you set up the mappings, this will produce decent-looking HTML output, except for the previously-mentioned lack of support for pictures, tables, and equations.
There is also a brief
entry on htmllite in the facilities Frame FAQ.
4. Cyberleaf
This product is another demonstration that it is not a good idea to design user interfaces by reading the entrails of chickens. Despite the user interface problems which I don't have time and energy to adequately rant about, this option doesn't absolutely suck. It does support pictures, but it mangles them in gratuitous ways. I have had reasonable success with using it to convert MIF files, but others have had less success.
Start it up by typing
cyberleaf &at the unix prompt. Go get a cup of coffee; it takes a long time to start up.
Once it finally starts up, it will present you with an inscrutable dialog box asking you what 'Web' you want to work on. This has nothing to do with the file system; it's just an arbitrary name, with a limit of ten or sixteen characters.
Once you have a web, you should add your document to the web.
Select the file by clicking on it in the list box at the left of the main Cyberleaf dialog.
Then click on the button labeled 'Run All Steps on Selected Files.' This will take a while.
However, 'Run All Steps' does not include 'Put the result in a place where a human could find them, you crapulous piece of software'. To do that, you have to click on the poorly-named 'Post...' button. This will let you select a directory to put the output in, and more or less do something reasonable.
Cyberleaf has worked for me, except for surprising tweaks of my pictures. However, it has failed for Juan Leon; we were not able to figure out what his problem might have been.