bmp to gif to Frame

[Lisa Bronson <lisa -dot- infocus -at- gmail -dot- com>]

(cross-posted to TECHWR-L and FrameUsers)


My co-worker and I often get screen information from the controls
engineers. They typically give us the information in two formats
(both, not one or the other):

1. As a Word document, which doesn't play very nicely with FrameMaker,
of course, but we've found that cutting and pasting the graphics, one
at a time, works reasonably well.

2. As individual graphic files, which have confusing, often similar
names. The program they use to get the screens for us (we can't do
this part of the process ourselves) saves the files as bmp's, which
are extremely large, and there can be dozens of these in a section. I
prefer to convert these to the much smaller gif format, then import
them (by embedding... I know it's not the recommended way, but it's
not my choice, so please don't flame me for that), but because of the
file names, it's easy to make mistakes! The engineer could type the
file name incorrectly or we could read it incorrectly (many of them
are very similar).

So... we wish we could do the cut and paste method *and* get the
smaller file size. I'm looking for suggestions on how to do that.

I'm wondering if a FrameScript script would be able to do this. Here
is my thought process. We do the cut and paste, then run a script on
the Frame document based on the following pseudocode:

loop through the document looking for anchored frames
loop through the frame looking for graphics
if the graphic is not a bmp, go on
if the graphic is a bmp, extract it to a graphics conversion program,
convert it to gif, and put it back where it was

As I wrote that, I got to wondering if it's possible to:

a) Tell what format a graphic is in.
b) Run an outside program to convert the files.

If either of those is not possible, this won't work at all.

If you have any ideas how this can most easily be accomplished, I'd
appreciate it!

Thanks,
Lisa B.

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