At 11:56 -0700 4/2/14, Carol J. Elkins wrote:

>Best practice for setting up character formats is to set everything As Is 
>except the feature that you want the character tag to control. That would 
>include setting the Font Family to As Is. So for Emphasis, for example, the 
>font family would be set to As Is and only the Angle set to Italic. This 
>enables the character tag to be applied to any text, regardless of its 
>paragraph usage. I can apply Emphasis to text defined as Times Roman, Arial, 
>etc., and the font is retained and only the Angle changed.

This is absolutely true, but not the problem you originally reported ;-)

Referring to your original problem, in the ancient version of FrameMaker that 
I'm currently using (7), character tagging is indeed lost in xrefs. It may be 
intended behavior, or just an accidental side-effect of the power of 
FrameMaker's cross-reference formatting. As it's got xref builders that can 
themselves apply formatting, it can't honor any formatting in the source text. 
I.e, <$paratext> means just that - the text of the source paragraph, and only 
the text. The question would be, if FrameMaker *did* honor character formatting 
in the source of the xref, how would it combine that with formatting applied in 
the xref format definition?

I can think of some clunky workarounds, but they're just that: clunky. One 
approach is clearly to avoid character formatting of the the xref source if 
possible. If you can't, then maybe break the xref source up using inlines so 
that you can 'restore' the required formatting in the xref format by building 
the xref in bits with the formatting you want? I.e. the source text would be 
something like 
<ParaWithTextasInlineA><CharFormattedBitasInline><ParaWithTextasInlineA>, and 
your xref format(s) would be something like <$paratext (to part A)><Emphasis 
(for char formatted bit><$paratext (to part B)>. But then all xrefs would 
actually be three xrefs, tripling your workload and adding maintenance issues.

How you got about it all depends on the context. I would guess from your 
original post that you want to use <$paratext> and get the text *and* any 
character formatting applied to it. But FrameMaker doesn't work like that: you 
can't 'recover' character formatting from an xref source's text.

I don't know about maker.ini fixes, as FrameMaker 7 for Mac doesn't use 
maker.ini.

If all the above is nonsense, or completely off-base, I apologize: I'm trying 
to think in the midst of a gale that's trying to take the roof off.

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]
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