### 6.1.3 Understanding why round-tripping is not an option

Mif2Go developers have conducted design studies to determine what it would take to round-trip between FrameMaker and Word. Their conclusion: round-tripping a document of any complexity from FrameMaker to Word and back is not feasible. Too much is lost. The time you “save” by bringing a Word document into FrameMaker is greatly exceeded by the time it takes to rebuild what you need in FrameMaker from the resulting rubble.

Use Word for review

If your purpose is review, use Mif2Go to produce Word files with Track Changes locked on (see §6.16 Turning on revision tracking in Word), then examine the changes in Word and edit the FrameMaker file by hand. Do you really want reviewers to add writing mistakes and style blunders that you might not notice? If you must copy/paste anything, use one of the plain-text add-ons, or paste into Notepad and recopy before pasting into FrameMaker. (If you paste RTF directly into FrameMaker you will pay (and pay, and pay) forever after, because Word artifacts cause issues in FrameMaker you cannot fathom.)

Migrate from Word to FrameMaker

If you need to go through this process only once, to get a legacy Word document into FrameMaker, use plain text and tag it all from scratch. Recreate indexing, hypertext links, cross references, and tables, and import graphics by reference. It might take a while, but the result will be a nice stable FrameMaker document. Do this for every review cycle? No one would even try.

| 6.1.2 Understanding differences in file sizes |  | 6.1.4 Migrating a document from FrameMaker to Word |