MifMucker

What's New?

Version 1.0.2 is available. A few more missing semicolons added for older Perl 4 interpreters.

See Availability on how to obtain the latest version.

What is MifMucker?

The MifMucker is a Perl application for manipulating Frame documents and books. It operates as a general front end for passing Frame documents of any type through a series of independent filters for processing. Filters operate on a single representation of the document in memory, hence filters can be chained together.

The MifMucker includes default filters that were deemed widely useful. These filters all have individual capabilities, limitations, and options. You can use the -usage option to get a usage message for each individual filter. Likewise, you can use the -filters option to get a list of available filters installed. Running the MifMucker without any command line options (mifmucker) gives a usage message on the MifMucker itself.

The default filters are:

• html -- converts Frame documents to HTML according to a map file.
• ascii -- converts Frame documents to formatted ASCII.
• search -- searches across frame documents (includes reg. expressions)
• readmif -- parser (internal only)
• writemif -- write from memory to mif file. Used as a MIF generator.
• fixhead -- converts hanging headings (3.1 side heads) into text flow

Requirements

The MifMucker requires:

• UNIX platform

• Perl V4.0 any patch level

• FrameMaker V3.1, V4.0, or FrameBuilder -- You'll need Frame if you want graphics or auto-generation of MIF, which you do, so consider this a requirement.

• Graphic conversion programs -- the HTML filter uses FrameMaker to convert graphics to PostScript. So, if you want to convert documents for use with the World Wide Web (WWW), the MifMucker will get the documents into PS. It will call a script (psconvert) to convert the graphics. The script should acts as a wrapper around a third party application that you specify for converting from PS to whatever format you want (probably GIF). As there are a number of free applications on UNIX platforms that can do this already, I decided to not reinvent the wheel (nor limit your choices). So:

  THE HTML FILTER DOES NOT GENERATE GIF FILES.

  Use something like ImageMagick for conversion from PS to GIF. Works like charm. See the file psconvert for more information. If you don't have a conversion program, that's fine, you'll just get text and PostScript images (which can still be viewed on the web, though not inlined). No big deal.

  A few notes about ImageMagick. You'll also need GhostScript because that's what ImageMagick uses to read/convert the PostScript. Please read the IM_psconvert file for more info about the ImageMagick tools.

Availability

The latest version of MifMucker is 1.0.2. You can get MifMucker in tar-gzipped file via HTTP (113816 bytes).