TransIMP - Loading Impression files into OvationPro
===================================================

Both Impression single file documents (type BC5 ImpDoc, black square icon
with a page and quill) and directory documents (type application, name
starts with a !, upright rectangle icon with a capital I) can be loaded by
dragging them to the OvationPro icon bar icon after the !TransIMP directory
has been 'seen' by RISCOS.


Because of their history, OvationPro and Impression are close to one another
in the way they work, and the features they provide. Despite this there are
differences, and perfect conversion of an Impression document to OvationPro
format will not always be possible.


Styles and Effects
------------------
Internally Impression does not support effects, instead hidden styles are
created to simulate them. When an Impression document is loaded these
pseudo-styles are turned into real named styles. This is a nice feature, it
means that you can now turn over a new leaf and use named styles instead of
effects.


First Line
----------
A small difference beteween Impression and OvationPro, yet one which has
many effects is the different way they flow text into frames. In general
Impression will fit slightly more material into a frame of a given size. One
reason for this is that the first baseline for text in a frame is positioned
at the height of the text ascender, rather than the accent height (as in
OvationPro). From version 2.59, OvationPro allows the ascender height to be
used, and converted documents will make use of this feature. It does mean
that converted documents will look and behave slightly differently to
OvationPro documents you may have created yourself.

Many conversions which at first sight look poor, are caused by a small
amount of text which has overflowed, creating new pages and so on. Simply
making some frame slightly bigger, deleting some text, or changing line
spacing can greatly improve things.

Often just making the frames on the master pages fractionally bigger will
improve the result considerably.


Group Frames
------------
In OvationPro, the members of a group must be next to one another in front -
back order. In Impression this is not the case, frames not in the group can
appear between group members in front - back order. When loading Impression
documents groups are preserved, so some frames may change their order.


Frame Borders
-------------
Although OvationPro supports Impression type Draw file borders, it does
not have the facility to store border definitions inside documents.
For the time being any border in Impression is converted into a plain
fixed width border in OvationPro.


Merge Commands
--------------
In Impression, a merge command amounts to a command string which is sent via
the Impulse protocol to a database. On loading, this is duplicated exactly,
producing in OvationPro terms a merge field with a macro set up which
invokes Impulse. If you have been using an external database like Impact
with Impression then this will all work (as long as you have the Impulse
applet loaded). The trouble occurs in the simple case, where things rely on
a small helper program inside Impression. In this situation the best thing
to do may be to delete the defined fields (see main menu,
File->MailMerge...->Fields), and then rearrange the merge tags in the text
if they're not in the right order.


Rule Offs
---------
OvationPro does not support vertical and horizontal rule offs, so these will
vanish from converted documents.


Numbering
---------
OvationPro does not support numbers - however the numbers will be displayed
as normal editable text.


Guide Frames
------------
OvationPro does not support guide frames. They are converted into a set of
four guide lines.


Master Frames
-------------
Impression allows the background colour of a document frame based on a
master frame to be changed. OvationPro does not. As a result frame colours
may change, in particular a frame may change from being transparent to
opaque.



Damaged Files
-------------
It is apparent that some Impression files are damaged. In particular the
style table can have dud entries. Such files will in fact crash later
versions of Impression. A fix is to scan all the text in the document and
discard any styles which are not used. Doing such a check takes time and
also removes any good styles which just happen to be unused. The default
behaviour of the loader is to do the check and throw away unused styles.

You can change this behaviour by changing

Set TransLoader$Tail ""

in the !TransIMP.!Run file to

Set TransLoader$Tail "-nostylecheck"

