Adobe FrameMaker: Pasting Text from Microsoft Word

Posted on: November 20th, 2009Author: barb.binderCategory: Adobe FrameMaker

By Barb Binder
Updated: June 8, 2023

This is one of my all-time favorite tips because it’s something I have to deal with on a regular basis.

Let’s say I need to replace a paragraph in my FrameMaker document with one from an MS Word file. The process seems easy enough: go to Word, select and copy the paragraph to the clipboard, return to FrameMaker, select the old text, and Paste. Right? No!

Instead of the text simply replacing my highlighted FrameMaker text, the clipboard text appears within an anchored frame–not exactly what I was looking for.

To get around the anchored frame, I’ll now have to undo the Paste step (by using the Undo command) and choose Paste Special, select “Text” and then click OK.

The workaround is found in FrameMaker’s “Clipboard Format Priority” list. If you want to change the paste priority order, you can do so by editing the maker.ini file (the maker.ini file is FrameMaker’s initialization file.).

Note: Before attempting the following steps, please make a back-up copy of the maker.ini file in case you need to restore it later.

1. Open Program Files > Adobe > Adobe FrameMaker 2022 > maker.ini in an ASCII text editor like Notepad.* **
2. Scroll down until you find:
   ClipboardFormatsPriorities=FILE, MIFW, MIF, RTF, OLE 2, META, EMF,  DIB, BMP, UNICODE TEXT, TEXT
   This list is read from left to right by FrameMaker, notice how TEXT appears at the end.
3. Rearrange the order so that TEXT is first:
   ClipboardFormatsPriorities=TEXT, FILE, MIFW, MIF, RTF, OLE 2, META, EMF,  DIB, BMP, UNICODE TEXT
4. Save and close the file and restart FrameMaker.

* Be sure to use a plain ASCII text editor for this job. Notepad is included with Windows. Trying to edit the file in a program like Word or Wordpad will reformat the maker.ini file and cause problems with FrameMaker.

** You will need admin rights to edit this file.