Great posts, everyone and thanks for all the fish. I mean help. Sorry John, couldn't help it.
We've set up numbering in our template with SEQ (sequence) fields and solved some of the problems. To see how SEQ fields work, just generate a caption or an xref in word, toggle the field codes, and take a look. It's also explained in the help, although not really well. But Stuart is right. You can't make a tag that uses SEQ fields, similar to creating a tag using autonumbering in FM. Well, at least we could not figure out how. We also separated the tag families (body, heading, and table) by starting each one with a tag based on (No Style). This allows us to make a feature change to an entire tag family by making the change to only the base tag. It also helps keep the docs generated by the enjanears intact when our template is attached. But as Stuart says, things can get mangled anyway. They somtimes import info from other Word docs when creating their own. The first time I created one of our big docs, I counted 187 tags in the source docs. It was SO much fun cleaning them all out. Fortunately, I have a shovel. :-) But no matter what you do, Word still has ways of using it's native "artificial" intelligence to reformat some things the docs while we sleep. The little paper clip, whom we have renamed from "Clippit" to "Gremlin" is at work. In the long run we plan on doing exactly what Jeremy has suggested. We are already using FM to generate our 3600 page docs from multiple (about 200) imported Word files. We plan to convert them back to individual Word files with Mif2Go, so that the enjanears can mangle, spindle, fold, mutilate, and update them for the next release. We will import the changes using unformatted text back into FM and then regenerate the Word files again with Mif2Go. Diane -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Jeremy H. Griffith Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 2:53 PM To: [email protected] Cc: Fred Ridder; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: OT: autonumbering in Word On Fri, 19 May 2006 17:21:46 -0400, "Fred Ridder" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>From: Stuart Rogers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > >>Regrettably, Jon, it sounds from McGhie's explanation that even your >>exhaustively careful preparation of numbering will not immunize you from >>all risks of numbering disaster. Apparently all you have to do is copy some >>numbered (or just bulleted!) content from another document and paste it >>into yours... That's pretty broken, all right... >In my experience with Word, the only truly reliable way to handle >numbering in Word is to avoid the autonumber feature altogether >and instead roll your own with the SEQ field code, which you >wind up using in a way that is fundamentally pretty similar to >FrameMaker's paragraph numbering except that you have to >assign a name to each individual digit's counter rather than being >able to name a complete multi-digit series as in Frame. Yes, I agree. That's the method we use in Mif2Go to make "live" autonumbers in Word docs, based on the Frame counters. The drawback WRT maintenance in Word is that you have to copy the SEQ fields from another para of the same type, or painfully recreate them by hand, for new paras; you can't include SEQ fields (or bullets) in the para format as such. This leads to the best workaround of all: use Frame, and generate the Word version on demand. ;-) We have several customers who do exactly that. It's even possible to do it in what used to be an all-Word shop. After all, if they get working Word files, why do they care *how* they were created? <vbg> >Unfortunately, since bullets use the same mechanism in Word, you >still have to live with bizarre behavior in that feature... Unless you use Frame/Mif2Go as your Word authoring tool... -- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.omsys.com/ _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/dgcaller%40earthlink.net Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info. _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
