The most frequently asked questions about conversion of legacy content are typically about the efforts required to make a conversion project successful.
To understand whether or not a conversion will be painless, you have to realize that every conversion of unstructured content to XML is style based. Whether you convert Word to DocBook, or FrameMaker to DITA, whether you use Mif2Go or FrameMaker conversion tables, you should map styles used in legacy documents to XML elements. For example, you define content formatted with the Heading1 style to be wrapped into the title element, text formatted with the Note style goes to the note element, and so on.
So, the success of a conversion project mainly depends on whether or not you used styles in your legacy documents properly and consistently. Remember, computers do not understand semantics on their own. They rely on styles instead. Computers cannot recognize a portion of content as a note, unless you apply the note format to the content.
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