At 02:30 PM 6/25/2009, Fred Ridder wrote:
>Am I correct that FrameMaker's behavior when you type an Enter in
>conditionalized text changed before version 8.0? The behavior I'm seeing
>in FM8.0 seems flat-out wrong to me, and is driving me crazy.
Fred,
You are correct and I agree that the behavior introduced in 8.0 is
counterintuitive. 7.0, 7.1, and 7.2 all behave the same way, as do 8.0 and
9.0.
What seems to happen is that in 7.x, when you create a new paragraph by
pressing Enter, the end-of-paragraph itself takes on any condition tags
applied to the object (character, variable, table anchor, etc.) immediately
preceding the insertion point. In 8.0 and 9.0, the new end-of-paragraph is
never conditional. It does not matter whether the insertion point is at the
end of the paragraph when you press Enter.
By the way, I found a surprise in the 7.x behavior also. Suppose you
have unconditional text followed by conditional text in one paragraph. If
you click in the unconditional portion and then press the right arrow until
the insertion point is between the unconditional and conditional material
and then type a character, the character will not be conditional. However,
if you click in the conditional portion and then press the left arrow until
the insertion point is between the two portions and then type a character,
the character will be conditional. The same is true for font properties. As
you type new characters, FrameMaker applies the properties of the adjacent
characters. If those properties are different to the left and right of
where you are typing, FrameMaker remembers how the insertion point was set.
If you move the insertion point with the arrow keys, FrameMaker changes the
properties assigned to new content when you cross a border between text
ranges with different properties but does not change them when you simply
reach the border.
The subtle detail that surprised me in 7.x is that when I pressed Enter
with the insertion point on the border between conditional and
unconditional text ranges, the new end-of-paragraph was always conditional,
even if I set the insertion point such that if I'd typed new characters
instead of pressing Enter, the new characters would have been unconditional.
--Lynne
Lynne A. Price
Text Structure Consulting, Inc.
Specializing in structured FrameMaker consulting, application development,
and training
lprice at txstruct.com http://www.txstruct.com
voice/fax: (510) 583-1505 cell phone: (510) 421-2284
