Richard: I always tweak the layout (making changes to column widths, breaking text streams in better places, etc). I have found that no matter how much you pay for DTP they never get it exactly right - so I don't pay for final DTP costs and do it myself. We often go the extra step of sending a completed/tweaked manual to an in-country proofer (native speakers with expertise in our field) and I have never had a complaint regarding this issue.
FYI: All my manuals are laid out with numbered headings so I always know exactly where I am regardless of language (and I actually have a degree in Spanish so for this language, understanding the content is no problem). Rick Quattro gave me some invaluable help over the phone so I (he) figured out where my inexperience had led me astray - I didn't have the correct formats selected for inclusion in the TOC. Maybe in 10 years I'll have this program completely figured out! Alison Alison Craig, Technical Writer Ultrasonix Medical Corporation Tel: (604) 279-8550, ext 127 Fax: (604) 279-8559 E-mail: alison.craig at ultrasonix.com -----Original Message----- From: Combs, Richard [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, November 25, 2009 11:24 AM To: Alison Craig; framers at lists.frameusers.com Subject: RE: Problems Generating TOC on Newly Translated File Alison Craig wrote: > I received my translated book back from the LSP complete with TOC, which > seemed to be fine. > > After tweaking the formatting in 10 chapters and 7 Appendices, then copying > in the correct Variables file I tried to Update the TOC (and all Numbering, > Cross-references, Text Insets and OLE links). Umm... should you really be doing this? I'm no expert on handling translations (that's someone else's job), so maybe I'm off base. But when we get translated books back, we generally make no changes to the translated files (oh, occasionally there's a doc number to correct or something like that), we just PDF them as is. (For Hebrew, the vendor even supplies the PDF, since they have to port the RTL languages to InDesign.) > Instead of 6 pages of proper TOC it generated less than one page of what > seems to be page numbers only. I have consulted the Manual and Scriptorium > FrameMaker book to no avail. In the bad TOC file, select View > Reference Pages. Find the TOC specification -- it's in a text frame with the flow name "TOC," and it contains paragraphs that have tag names like the headings included in the TOC, but with a "TOC" suffix (e.g., "Heading1TOC"). It sounds like each of those pgfs contains only the page number variable (<$pagenum>). Now find the TOC spec in the ref pages of a good TOC and compare it to the bad TOC spec. It may look more like this: <$chapnum> <$paratext> <$pagenum> (there are tabs in there, including a leader tab in front of <$pagenum>) If that's the situation, try this: Copy all the text in the good TOC specification and replace all the text in the bad TOC specification with it. Then update/regenerate. If I'm completely off base regarding the situation or that doesn't solve the problem, try spending some quality time in the "Tables of Contents" section of the help/manual. Even if you can't figure it out, a better understanding of TOCs in FM might help you describe the situation in more detail. Richard G. Combs Senior Technical Writer Polycom, Inc. richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom 303-223-5111 ------ rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom 303-777-0436 ------
