Editing Adobe FrameMaker (section)

== MIF ==
MIF (Maker Interchange Format) is a [[markup language]] that functions as a companion to FrameMaker. MIF always had 3 purposes. The first was to represent FrameMaker documents in a relatively simple [[ASCII]]-based format, which can be produced or understood by other software systems and also by human operators. The second was to ensure any version of FrameMaker could read a document produced by any other version, at least to the extent it had the same features. While every version of FrameMaker could read the last couple of version's documents, reading them all took too much software effort and testing, so reading MIF was sufficient. The third was to ensure that FrameMaker would never lose a writer's work. If FrameMaker crashed, it would first write out the current document in MIF.

Any document that can be created interactively in FrameMaker can also be represented, exactly and completely, in MIF (the reverse, however, is not true: a few FrameMaker features are available only through MIF). All versions of FrameMaker can export documents in MIF, and can also read MIF documents, including documents created by an earlier version or by another program.