Hi All,

We have a library of a few dozen books (about 10,000 pages), and many of the 
files use the same graphics or composites built from shared graphics. We've run 
upon a challenge, though, in that things have gotten complex enough that we 
can't always use subfolders to group the graphics in a logical way so that we 
know where to look to find them. To complicate matters, we have recently 
endured several rounds of layoffs that have rather drastically diminished our 
team to just me and a trainer and our boss. :-\  The graphic artist was the 
last of our casualties.

I am now discovering how much our artist was keeping in his head. Now, I know 
the idea of cataloging or browsing graphics is really probably out of scope for 
any desktop publishing application, but when you're dealing with 
graphic-intensive books in FM, with so much content to manage...! We have 
single-sourced about 75% of the projects, so the text part of the FM files is 
in manageable condition, thanks to insets, shared files, conditional text, 
variables, and the like. But the graphics...! Egads! We really need to simplify 
and find a way to quickly locate and identify the graphics files!

I'm wondering whether we could use the source graphics rather than the output 
files. The source files include CDR, AI, DWG, DXF, and VSD files. All of those 
were being output to TIFF or JPG for use in FM. I have heard that FM is 
supposed to import CDR files, but using FM 7.2 I haven't had very good luck 
(possibly my mistakes).

I'm also thinking about file structure in that right now, we have the books 
grouped by product and the output graphics in the product directories at the 
same "tree" or path level as the FM files folder for the product. Aren't there 
some limitations about how long the path can be or how many folders up and down 
the path between the container doc and the graphic you're inserting that can 
impact FM ability to display the images? It seems like about 5 of the ..\..\..\ 
things in the referenced file path causes an issue...?

And the other thing that's brewing in my mind is, surely there's some program 
somewhere that catalogs graphics of various file formats when you provide a 
path or group of paths for a repository...??

Given the tech market and economic rollercoaster of the last few years, I know 
I'm not the only writer to find myself in this position. Any insight that any 
of you can provide would be greatly appreciated!
 
Rene L. Stephenson




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