Dear Alison,
I had met similar problems 10 years ago, when I started translating and typesetting FM documents. There was/is not a short-cut solution to the problems. But the lessons that I learned are: 1. Never change the relative path info in the FM files. Be careful of your fingers when you are prompted to locate the missing images, say when you need to re-save FM documents into MIF, to be processed by a CAT tool. Just consistently ignore and never redirect! Actually there are tools/scripts out there which can automatically re-save every FM in a book, or in a folder (and its subfolders) while keeping the original linking info intact. 2. Just in case that the path info has been changed, say from relative paths to absolute paths, which is your case, I am sure you can still change them back, in a dirty, quick way. First, you need to save all FM files into MIF. Then you can use a search-and-replace tool that supports wildcards/regular expressions, such as the legendary UltraEditor - just replace the "c:\folder\subfolers\" stuff with "..\..\" - of course the strings look differently in the MIF, but this is a just a quick example. And finally, you resave all MIF's back to FM's. Actually, I have been thinking about creating a tool to streamline this whole process, though I personally do not need it, as I had learned my lesson, and I have had my associates learn it too. But, before you try the above, you must ensure that the path info in our FM files have REALLY been changed. Actually, if the files are saved in the root directory of your disk, say "c:\", then when opening them, FrameMaker may try locating the linked image files in "c:\", not in their relative path. So, I would suggest that you copy your FM files into a folder that is "deep" enough, and see if FrameMaker will suggest relative paths when opening them. Kindest regards, Wei Jiang Senior Chinese Translator, Project Manager of Multilingual Localization Projects Beijing, China From: [email protected] [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Alison Craig Sent: Friday, April 01, 2011 5:15 AM To: framers at lists.frameusers.com Subject: Relative Path for Images Changed to Absolute FM 9 Version: 9.0p255 Unstructured OS: Windows 7, 64 bit (brand new machine) After several problems, I've finally received a set of newly translated Simplified Chinese files back from the (new to me) LSP. Due to budgetary consideration, I always perform final DTP on the book before I publish to PDF. My problem is that every single image (all imported by reference) has had the relative path changed to an absolute path and I have to re-link every one of them when I open each file (some files have hundreds of images as I use icons in instructions to match the proprietary console on our ultrasound machines). In a perfect world I would return this to the LSP and have them fix it, but these manuals are already behind schedule. I have searched the last 2 years of list posting and cannot find the specific answer I am looking for. Is there someplace I can change the absolute path back to the relative path? Even if I have to make the change once for every file in the book that would still only be 5 minutes work instead of hours and hours of work. FYI: I will be working with the LSP to ensure this problem doesn't happen again. Alison Alison Craig, Technical Writer Ultrasonix Medical Corporation Tel: (604) 279-8550, ext 127 E-mail: <mailto:alison.craig at ultrasonix.com> alison.craig at ultrasonix.com -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://lists.frameusers.com/pipermail/framers/attachments/20110401/44dc88a5/attachment.html>
