Re: [Framers] Nostalgia - was Re: FrameMaker 2015
On Thu, 2 Apr 2020, Craig Ede wrote: Nostalgia can cause trouble. I recently was in an interview with a True, to some degree. On the other hand, I've noted some annoying shifts in some language "pools" such that "process" becomes more important than "results". This seems to be especially true in academia. I've been teaching some online classes in another technical subject area entirely (music technology -- recording, mixing, live sound as part of a music technology masters). Recently, the university hired an external bunch of educrats to "review" material and make it "align" to new "standards", forcing dull, dull, dull language that only educrats can love (students hate it, as did I as a student when this kind of thing started to take hold 40-50 years ago). When asked to build and teach these classes a few years back, getting them online seemed like an impossibility. But I thought about it for a spell and came up with a few techniques, one of them being that EVERY word of the online content -- from instructions to readings -- would never, ever fall into that dull, passive, academic drone language. Without getting artificially giddy or imprecise, all text would excite and engage. Seemed to work; my classes picked up some campus-wide awards and the overall program itself was in the top 10 of the entire online offerings in the USA. Of course, following this review, I got into trouble -- but fought back and actually won. (And probably picked up some enemies among the educrats.) multinational Health Care company in the Milwaukee/Waukesha area and referred to 'tagging' paragraphs in unstructured FrameMaker. The I can't for the life of me see what's wrong with this. interviewer was nonplussed and corrected me, saying unstructured FrameMaker was not like XML. Well, it isn't. But tagging was how the process was described. Absolutely. But I believe he saw that use of the terminology as a slip in my understanding of the two faces of FrameMaker, unstructured and structured, both of which had importance for this particular job. How were you supposed to describe this action? Didn't get that contract. Probable a multiplicity of factors, but this tagging thing didn't help. And you might have dodged a bullet, such as "non-doers" telling you how to "do." That gets realy annoying, especially when your methods/words work and regular folks/users see and appreciate this. Frank Stearns FSA ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
[Framers] Nostalgia - was Re: FrameMaker 2015
In 1990 or so I'd just completed migrating some 6000 pages of DEC RNO (with pieces of UNIX Troff tossed in) over to LaTeX for my primary client of the day (Aptec Systems, a Floating Point Systems spin-off who made high-speed I/O computers. We're talking large fractions of a million dollars systems (multi-millions for the "big" systems) whose then fantastic bus speeds are today dwarfed by that $500 laptop at Best Buy or Walmart.) One of the engineers had a copy of FM 1.3 on his Sun 3/50 invited me to have a look. I was not impressed -- at all. (By that time, while mostly hating it, I could get LaTeX to sit up, roll-over, and play dead -- which it did do from time to time with no prompting.) Months later, that same engineer showed me FM 2.1. Wow. Now we're getting somewhere, as I'd just battled through Ventura Publisher's endless bugs on a project for another client. I'm not exactly sure how the decision was made, but Aptec shifted over to FrameMaker 2.1 (which cost money) from LaTeX which was "free". It might have had something to do with LaTeX bringing even the newer "hot rod" DEC microvaxes to their knees when I ran a job. The engineers would march around my cubical with torches chanting curses, while the system manager scrambled to find resources to handle all the usual product cycle crunch conditions -- doc releases parallel with product releases. Aptec was also shifting over to more of those new-fangled SUN workstations, which were completely independent of the VAXes. "Good! Kick that tech-writer P-I-A over onto the UNIX systems!" The guys were all s happy that LaTeX was no longer crippling their main development platforms. (They finally stopped blaming me personally.) But it did mean yet another migration of those 1000s of pages of docs from LaTeX over to FM. I got pretty handy with MIF and MML (remember MML?). Other conversion help came from macros in MS WORD-for-DOS (perhaps the only Word version that was worthwhile; much more reliable than word for windows) and lots of fun with the text processing power of UNIX and even similar command line functions in VMS. FM 3.0 really started to "open up the world" and provided a whole new look and feel to the documents, and was so much easier to use. For its day "Best Looking/most functional" FM version award probably goes to FM3 on monochrome Sunview. Having cut my teeth on embedded-format command word-processors and typesetters in the mid-1970s, WYSIWYG systems always seemed to be something of a sham, especially when they were so prone to bugs and crashes, such as that Ventura project revealed. But I made my declaration at FM 2.1 that FM was the FIRST WYSIWYG system that actually made sense and lived up to the promises of such systems, and did so (mostly) with reliability and elegance, and certainly for a reasonable price and licensing scheme when compared to the competitors, such as Interleaf. FM4 brought along that wonderful table editor and the API. Woo hoo! Now we could have some real fun. Our flagship product, IXgen, was born, and became highly popular. Other fun FM aids (born a little earlier) caught the attention of multiple people, including some folks at Cisco Systems who had been offered a seat on Frame's newly-formed Customer Advisory Board. To their credit (and unknown to me at the time) Cisco told FM that they certainly had enough "large customer" representation on the board (Boeing, BEA Systems, US Army [IIRC] among others) but they lacked any "small user" representation. That's when my name came up and I was invited to join the board to represent independents and contractors who used FM. Unfortunately, the board went away when Adobe purchased Frame Technologies. (For more "museum" stories, visit fsatools.com; select "FSA Resources", Early Products.) More fun as the years ticked by and my company pivoted from tech pubs to software products, mostly for FM. The landscape now is quite different; few folks do indexing any more. "Just google it" is the new mantra. This is okay for me; I can slide into semi-retirement and support the IXgen users who are still active. Thanks to all present and past users of our products. Frank Stearns FSA ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] alternatives to VirtualBox in Windows
On Mon, 10 Sep 2018, Robert Lauriston wrote: Windows has its own virtual PC system. In Windows 7 it's Windows Virtual PC, which has to be installed. In Windows 10 it's Hyper-V, which is built in. I don't remember the issues now, but at least in Win 7 for my needs at the time there were some show-stoppers with the built-in virtual system from Microsoft. In contrast, Virtualbox simply installed and ran, no fuss, no muss, with just the right set of user controls and operating options. The built-in "Hyper-V" might be worth a try under Win10, but to be honest, I don't entirely trust MS. Remember, they're the ones who through their OS issues for Framers effectively started this conversation in the first place! YMMV. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] Save as PDF with Windows 10 and FM 2015
Hi All - Regarding the various "breakages" in Windows versions for a given FM feature... There is one solution that could be permanent or accessed "in case of emergency": use an emulator. That is, run a virtual version of the desired OS inside the OS version you're forced to use. I've been using Oracle's "VirtualBox" emulator for several years now, and there are other emulators out there as well. You can run just about anything inside of anything. You can have a measure of communication between the two environments. (I can copy and paste between environments, for example, and also elect to access host system hardware, such as USB and ethernet ports. You can also mount host file systems from within the virtual machine.) In my case I have some very old (but vital) custom business applications that only run in XP or older -- but it all lives on a Win7 machine. Recoding those old database apps to run in a newer OS, along with importing all that old data, would be prohibitively expensive. Running the old apps in an emulator costs next to nothing and no old code need be disturbed. So, while I haven't checked, it's quite likely you could run a Win 7 emulation hosted by Win10 -- all while sidestepping the Win10 problems. It's pretty slick. Install Virtualbox on the host machine; this brings up a window that *is* a machine that will run the OS you really want to use. Install the desired OS in the virtual machine and away you go. Frank Stearns Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10 & newer is HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] FRMAKER-3533 - FM-14 Marker pod does not work
On Wed, 1 Nov 2017, Klaus Daube wrote: Fiends, Please vote on the bug report FRMAKER-3533: Marker pod does not diplay current marker Problem Description: The contents of a selected marker is not displayed in the Marker pod. /Shameless Plug on Or, just use IXgen and be done with the marker pod. :) /Shameless Plug off Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] *****SPAM***** Re: Old FrameMaker books?
On Mon, 2 Oct 2017, Steve Rickaby wrote: At 21:33 + 2/10/17, Wroblewski, Victoria wrote: This might be the reason we stopped actually doing index entries and have been quietly deleting index files from our books (I have a former co worker from another company who is in horror over this idea). Use the search, people. It is horrifying. the like. Who has the time to wade through 847 hits to find the possible one relevant one? Or work out what the search grammar is, always assuming that there is one? I have for example totally given up trying to fox out technical issues with Parallels products for just this reason. Such things can actually drive customers away, and the opposite can hold true too. It's amazing what has become "acceptable". After reviewing the first 1 or 2 returns from that batch of 847, many folks just shrug and give up -- or maybe go watch a Youtube video. While I'm only partly holding my breath, perhaps one day the index (a real index, of quality) will be rediscovered as this remarkable method of sorting through information. And as Steve implies, this will be something "new" for Marketing to toot as well -- indexed user docs! Until then -- and in the meantime -- we still have IXgen available to make the mechanics of FM indexing so much easier. :) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] FrameMaker 7.2 Crashes
Older versions of FM sometimes seem unhappy running directly in a newer OS. Try VirtualBox from Oracle. It's free; you can set up a virtual XP environment under Win 7 or Win 10, install FM in that XP world, and away you go, often faster and without those quirks compared to running the older FM natively. (I've found the emulator offering from Microsoft to be lacking and unreliable. What a surprise.) With a few configuration tweaks, the virtual environment can r/w "real" disk locations outside the environment, you can copy and paste (control-C/V) to and from apps inside and outside the virtual environment, and you can send/receive from your USB devices, such as printers, keyboards, mice. Two caveats: You'll need original XP disks to do the install; and so far there is no support for firewire devices. Overall a headache saver and in our case, we have a 25 year-old custom database that's impossible to run in Win7 but works just fine in Virtualbox. A HUGE time saver and business saver, actually -- we were unable to rewrite that db for a newer OS. And oh, btw, FM7.x runs nicely in that environment as well. :) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] Suddenly not working FM functionality? - also, a shout-out to Tech Support for being so responsive!!!!
On Sat, 29 Apr 2017, Tammy Van Boening wrote: And you have beachfront property in Arizona to sell, right? LOL!!! Madame, you wound me. You've not heard of the PFW (Phoenix Fisherman's Wharf)? Surely, surely you've heard of the Flagstaff Fjord... (... Hey, it could happen (or did already), maybe in several million years of tectonic plate movement) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com -Original Message- From: Framers [mailto:framers-bounces+tammyvb=spectrumwritingllc@lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Frank Stearns Sent: Saturday, April 29, 2017 2:47 PM To: An email list for people using Adobe FrameMaker software. <framers@lists.frameusers.com> Subject: Re: [Framers] Suddenly not working FM functionality? - also, a shout-out to Tech Support for being so responsive On Sat, 29 Apr 2017, Tammy Van Boening wrote: - snips - Now, if I could just figure out how to send them a big batch of my homemade chocolate chip cookies when this is said and done! I'll, uh, er, hand-deliver those, uh, cookies for you. Just send them to me; I'm *completely* trustworthy when it comes to homemade cookies. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] Suddenly not working FM functionality? - also, a shout-out to Tech Support for being so responsive!!!!
On Sat, 29 Apr 2017, Tammy Van Boening wrote: - snips - Now, if I could just figure out how to send them a big batch of my homemade chocolate chip cookies when this is said and done! I'll, uh, er, hand-deliver those, uh, cookies for you. Just send them to me; I'm *completely* trustworthy when it comes to homemade cookies. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] Font Size in Index Marker Pod (FRMAKER-2451)
On Mon, 20 Mar 2017, Rick Quatro wrote: IXgen is a very useful plugin for marker-intensive documents. I used it years ago and recommended it to several of my clients. My only complaint is that it takes the liberty of balancing square brackets when it puts the text back into the markers. This was a fatal problem for one of my clients that was trying to use IXgen with TimeSavers markers which sometimes use unbalanced open square brackets in its marker syntax (essentially, Postscript code). In my view, IXgen shouldn't make any changes to the marker text that you don't explicitly specify. But this is certainly an edge case, so if you are not using TimeSavers markers, this won't be a concern for you. **IXGEN HAS BEEN UPDATED** We've now included a "passthrough" marker-type option for such cases. (In many other situations, you do want -- and need -- brackets balanced.) Hope that helps, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com -Original Message- From: Framers [mailto:framers-bounces+rick=rickquatro@lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Frank Stearns Sent: Monday, March 20, 2017 12:14 AM To: An email list for people using Adobe FrameMaker software. Subject: Re: [Framers] Font Size in Index Marker Pod (FRMAKER-2451) On Sun, 19 Mar 2017, Rick Quatro wrote: The problem here is simply that the text size in the marker window is too small. It would be nice to be able to configure the size and possibly the font in windows like these where the user has to type/edit text. On marker-intensive documents, I would probably choose a larger, mono-spaced font for the marker window. snips Hi In the last days there was some discussion about them index marker text window. Another idea would be to use IXgen and bypass the limits (and sometimes miseries) of the marker window entirely. Most marker display and edit entities generated by IXgen rely on FrameMaker documents that we provide as templates. And, because the IXgen templates are plain old FM documents, you can modify those templates to use whatever font size and styles you'd like. For more information about IXgen please visit our site (in the sig block below). Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 www.fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] Font Size in Index Marker Pod (FRMAKER-2451)
On Sun, 19 Mar 2017, Rick Quatro wrote: The problem here is simply that the text size in the marker window is too small. It would be nice to be able to configure the size and possibly the font in windows like these where the user has to type/edit text. On marker-intensive documents, I would probably choose a larger, mono-spaced font for the marker window. snips Hi In the last days there was some discussion about them index marker text window. Another idea would be to use IXgen and bypass the limits (and sometimes miseries) of the marker window entirely. Most marker display and edit entities generated by IXgen rely on FrameMaker documents that we provide as templates. And, because the IXgen templates are plain old FM documents, you can modify those templates to use whatever font size and styles you'd like. For more information about IXgen please visit our site (in the sig block below). Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 www.fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] OT Followup: Stopping Adobe's auto install of Reader DC
On Thu, 16 Mar 2017, Stefan Gentz wrote: Hi Frank, I'd like to follow up with you on this. Could you please get in touch with me so that we can investigate this together? Hi Stefan -- Thanks for your interest. So here's the maddening deal. My long-standing pratice with ALL "updates" -- whether OS or app -- is to select the "ask before installing updates" option. As far as I know, this is what had been done with acrobat. In my recent experience, the Adobe Reader updater is ignoring this setting. A web search revealed that many other folks have had the same issue -- unwanted updates from Reader XI to DC, but a clue was given regarding the system task list. So I found the Adobe Reader updater task in the task list for the system. Its "charter" was to update Reader at each login. Gawk!! That's the first major sin, as I see it -- don't be putting tasks like that on my system without my approval. But for those following this thread, it got to be even *more* of a Zombie horror movie. I thought I'd tamed the unwanted updates by deleting this task. But a few days later, DC had installed itself yet again and a NEW task had been entered into the task list -- same as before; update on login. So then I went to "services" and KILLED the Adobe Reader updater there. This is too bad, because I'd like to be informed of new versions. (Maybe a Reader DC 2.0 would address my dislikes of the first version.) But inform me only, do not force me to a new upgrade. This is by far and away the "rudest" behavior I've ever seen from an updater -- all these things happening behind the scenes with ZERO notification of the user. (And, you'd think after 10 or 11 removals of Reader DC and a reinstall of Reader XI each time that something or somebody would get a clue and STOP installing DC, uninvited, on this system.) It's not lost on me that Reader is "free"; I appreciate that. But if a company ever wants to entice people into buying the full suite of some product, they won't treat users like this. Such actions inspire *exactly* the opposite interest from me and no doubt others. Thanks again for listening, and thanks in advance for any "advice" you can pass along to management. Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com Global Evangelist, Technical Communication [Adobe]<http://www.adobe.com/> [Adobe TCS Icon] <http://www.adobe.com/products/technicalcommunicationsuite.html> [Adobe FrameMaker Icon] <http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker.html> [Adobe RoboHelp Icon] <http://www.adobe.com/products/robohelp.html> [Adobe Captivate Icon] <http://www.adobe.com/products/captivate.html> [Adobe Acrobat Icon] <http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat.html> Connect with us: [http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/files/2015/12/facebook-128-128px.jpg] Facebook<https://www.facebook.com/adobetcs> | [http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/files/2015/12/twitter.jpg] Twitter<https://twitter.com/adobetcs> | [http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/files/2015/12/LinkedIn.jpg] LinkedIn<https://www.linkedin.com/groups/2381149> | [http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/files/2015/12/YouTube.jpg] YouTube<https://www.youtube.com/user/AdobeTCS> | [http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/files/2015/12/Blog.jpg] Our Blog<http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/> | [http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/files/2015/12/Forum-Chats.jpg] Adobe TCS User Forum<https://forums.adobe.com/community/technical_communications_suite> On 7 Mar 2017, at 22:19, Frank Stearns <fra...@pacifier.com<mailto:fra...@pacifier.com>> wrote: I'm cautiously optimistic that this particular zombie beast has finally been destroyed. The unwanted install of DC happened twice more since my last post, and in a rage I went to vent at Adobe support. Of course, one is not allowed to contact them for such a lowly product (or not having parted with cash earlier), but a few posts in the "forums" section led me to look at the windows Task scheduler. Interesting critter. Sure enough, our delightful friends had entered a task to update Reader at EVERY login. I'm not familiar with the nuts and bolts of the scheduler, but apparently there are no settings to notify the user, the task "just happens". (Or, if such notifications are possible, they were certainly disabled for this task.) With MUCH GLEE, I found the command to DELETE this task, and happily did so. I confirmed that the Reader Update task is no longer in the task list for this system. So, we'll see just how much of a horror movie is rolling here, and whether or not I'm updated to DC again. If so, I won't need to email; you'll *hear* me scream from thousands of miles away. A note to Adobe if you're listening: ple
Re: [Framers] FM 2017 Feature Request: Restore color and scaling to menu icons
There's perhaps an easy solution to this that as far as I know has not been mentioned. Adobe could take a lesson from Avid's "Protools" product, arguably the recording industry standard for high-end, high-track count audio recording and mixing (and these days you can even toss in video clips). There is a HUGE amount of information presented on the Protools desktop, much of it real-time. To run it well takes a minimum of two large-format monitors (I use three). Waveforms, channel strips, processing plug-ins, input/output matrices, level meters, et al -- lots of stuff to look at, and much of it in motion. So, of course, color is an important element in helping the user manage all these visual elements and not create chaos. (They've done a masterful job by the way; you're not even aware how good it is or just how much information you can take in until you're forced to use some other tool that's not as good.) But here's the brilliant addition that came in a few years ago. The color control panel (where the user can assign colors to various things) now includes variable brightness and saturation controls. You can make color items cartoonishly saturated, or take them all the way down to monochrome -- and **every point between**. This could likely be done with the FM icons and thus please everybody. And, I'd even suggest an enhancement that I wish Avid would look into. Give us the ability to create "color groups" within the UI (rather than just one overall group). Then, to each group, let us assign various screen elements or groups of elements as we please so that we can control the visuals of each group independently of other visual groups. Within the panel for each group might be color assignment options, but most importantly would be those variable saturation and brightness controls. We could set what we want for the entire thing. Want dim icons but bright pods? Fine. Want the opposite? That's fine too. Want the whole thing bright or dim, saturated or sepia? You got it. Clean, simple, and extremely user-eye friendly. Frank Stearns Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
[Framers] OT Followup: Stopping Adobe's auto install of Reader DC
I'm cautiously optimistic that this particular zombie beast has finally been destroyed. The unwanted install of DC happened twice more since my last post, and in a rage I went to vent at Adobe support. Of course, one is not allowed to contact them for such a lowly product (or not having parted with cash earlier), but a few posts in the "forums" section led me to look at the windows Task scheduler. Interesting critter. Sure enough, our delightful friends had entered a task to update Reader at EVERY login. I'm not familiar with the nuts and bolts of the scheduler, but apparently there are no settings to notify the user, the task "just happens". (Or, if such notifications are possible, they were certainly disabled for this task.) With MUCH GLEE, I found the command to DELETE this task, and happily did so. I confirmed that the Reader Update task is no longer in the task list for this system. So, we'll see just how much of a horror movie is rolling here, and whether or not I'm updated to DC again. If so, I won't need to email; you'll *hear* me scream from thousands of miles away. A note to Adobe if you're listening: please don't do things like this. Such actions only alienate people. Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] OT: Stopping Adobe's auto install of Reader DC
On Wed, 1 Mar 2017, Craig, Alison wrote: How do you *re*install Reader 11? This link should get you to a dropdown list of install options, including Reader 11. Don't be alarmed, the first pane says "Reader DC" but until they get around to breaking this, 11 is an option on the #3 dropdown list as you step through the selection process. (I spot- checked on various Windows and Mac OS listings, using English as the language.) http://get.adobe.com/reader/otherversions Remove DC first, then install 11. This install works quickly and easily (imagine that). The irritation, though, is that I've lost all the little config tweaks done to 11 prior to the previous DC hijacking, not to mention the history stack. I despise the Acrobat "DC" programs and have adamantly refused to upgrade Acrobat Pro 11 to the "DC" version at work - although I seem to be stuck with it at home. I'm really tired of companies reworking their programs so they're "new and improved" - are you listening Adobe and Microsoft? Yes, it's rare that such reworks are an improvement. It does happen, but not often. Generally that means they *look* cool (or what some dork thinks is cool) but they're actually massive steps backward in productivity as they keep driving us back to the mouse and away from shortcut keys. Amen. And it often goes deeper than that, subtle little things where that same "dork" is clueless about use. One of the ongoing irritations with windows is that substring matches no longer fully work in file name searches. Why on earth would they break that? Sigh. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
[Framers] OT: Stopping Adobe's auto install of Reader DC
This is getting insane. Four times now, behind my back, Adobe has "upgraded" Reader 11 to DC. NO updating controls than I can find are set to auto. They're either set to "ask before updating" or disabled. I keep removing DC and reinstalling 11 (you'd think Adobe would get the message), but like a bad horror movie, the DC monster keeps coming back. Am I missing an update control somewhere? (Win7 Pro, SP1) I recall seeing some apps designed to block Adobe from doing this, but it seems ludicrous to have to do that (and who knows what's lurking in those apps). Any suggestions? Thanks in advance, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10-15 HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com 1-435-275-8981 fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
[Framers] Malware lure? Was Re: latest news
On Mon, 23 May 2016, Eduardo F. Cidade Sr. wrote: Hey, Did you hear the latest news? You should definetely read more info here <http://dongythyphi.hotein.com/aeygsfao> Why does this look like a lure to a malware site? If it is not, apologies to the original poster; and could you tell us a bit more about this "latest news"? If it is, please find a nearby high cliff. You'll know what to do next. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10/11/12 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com <mailto:fra...@fsatools.com> 1-435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] OT: The history of PDF
On Thu, 14 Apr 2016, Craig, Alison wrote: Wow - $695 in 1993! That rivals the $700 I spent on HP's first laser printer at about the same time. (It printed in black at a whopping 300 dpi.) Were we rich or stupid? ;-) Both?? We could charge clients relatively more for services in those days? In 1991 I spent well north of $10K for a bare-bones Sparc workstation, and thankfully got a courtesy copy of FM3 and then FM4 because of the development work we were doing. Our products gave an assist to the FM Sales force as prospective FM purchasers would ask, "that's all well and good, but does this Framing-Maker thingie do this or that?" We tried to have "this" and "thats" on hand to help out. For nostalgia and amusement, visit the "FSA Resources>Early Products" portion of www.fsatools.com for more history. Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10/11/12 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com <mailto:fra...@fsatools.com> 1-435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
[Framers] Announcement: A new Website for IXgen and FSA Tools
Greetings Framers - Many of you have been using IXgen, our indexing and marker management plug-in for FrameMaker, for a long time. Thank you -- we appreciate that. Today we're introducing our new and much improved http://www.fsatools.com website. This site redesign is probably 10 years overdue, given that the original site was hand-coded in HTML1 some 20 years ago. (Apologies for any pain the old site caused. This new site should be much more tolerable when you need to access IXgen particulars.) If you haven't seen IXgen before but are tasked with creating indexes for your FrameMaker documents, take a look. You might be happily surprised at how quickly a good index can be crafted. If you have any questions/comments please send them along. And if you'd like to be on our "Links" page, please contact me off-list. Cordially, Frank Stearns Frank Stearns Associates makers of IXgen for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com 1 435 275 8981 http://www.fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] FrameMaker 7.2 Not Responding on New PC
On Tue, 1 Mar 2016, Robert Lauriston wrote: FrameMaker 7.2 was released in 2005. There's no reason to upgrade something that works, and no reason to spend time and money on upgrades to deal with Microsoft compatibility bugs you can solve for free. Switching from 7.2 to 13 (2015) could be a lot of work due to the switch to Unicode in version 8. Plus there's the learning curve introduced by the weird UI layered on in version 9. If you use keyboard shortcuts instead of the mouse, the switch could be particularly painful. Amen, Robert. For us, FM7 has become something of what Word is for a lot of people -- a utility word processor for day-to-day tasks. We don't roll out the 777 to make a quick trip to the store when the reliable (and fully amortized) old Chevy is available. Oh, and even old FM7 is wayyy more reliable than Word. Plus, if the task suddenly got more complex, without breaking stride FM7 could sprout some little wings and possibly still get us there, likely avoiding the big, expensive machine until it's really needed for something it does better (if you'll allow me to torture the transportation metaphor. ) Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10/11/12 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com <mailto:fra...@fsatools.com> 1-435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com NEW WEBSITE SOON! ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] FrameMaker 7.2 Not Responding on New PC
On Tue, 1 Mar 2016, Robert Lauriston wrote: Windows Virtual PC is a VM, Microsoft's answer to Oracle's VirtualBox. XP Mode is a Virtual PC system image that includes XP and uses the license from the Windows 7 host. It integrates with Windows 7 better than VirtualBox does. This has nothing to do with the various Windows 7 "compatibility modes." You have to download and install Virtual PC and the XP Mode add-on. You can also use Virtual PC to test legacy versions of MSIE. VirtualBox is more work to achieve the same end and it requires an XP license. It's true; there is a separate emulator from MS. Part of the frustration (and fuel for continued mistrust of MS) was that one would think MS's own compatibility modes for hosting its very own legacy products would be enough, particularly after it examined the app and chose the mode! But you had better luck than we did. We started down the road of the separate emulator from MS but then as the MS solution was examined in detail, there appeared to be a number of "gotchas" and potential "breakages" we weren't willing to risk. And, after 25+ years of windows, we've learned the hard way to expect, uh, bumps in the road with many of the solutions offered by MS. :) For us, at the same detailed level of product examination, the Oracle solution seemed cleaner and less likely to cause collateral damage or problems. (Can't remember the specifics now, but there was one particular show-stopper with the MS emulator that pushed us away.) Indeed, VirtualBox does require an XP license but that was easy for us; all of our XP install disks from all of our systems are stored in our applications library. We just grabbed one at random and about 10 minutes later the Virtualbox was up and running, no fuss, no muss, no weird problems, and the underlying Win7 install was unaffected. As they say, your mileage may vary. Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10/11/12 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com <mailto:fra...@fsatools.com> 1-435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com NEW WEBSITE SOON! ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] FrameMaker 7.2 Not Responding on New PC
On Tue, 1 Mar 2016, Kevin Ryan wrote: Thanks to all for the tips. Here's one more: get the *free* Oracle VM VirtualBox emulator. There are several different versions of hosts and emulations in the Virtualbox family; we have the XP emulator running on Win7 Pro. In the emulator we run several legacy applications, including FM7, that either ran poorly or not at all under Win7. (FM7 would work for a short while in Win7, but then would get so slow it had to be stopped and restarted.) After a year the emulation environment has so far proven flawless and is fast enough to do real-time audio. You can mount file systems outside the emulator; and you can copy and paste between apps inside and outside of the emulator. The emulator can be selectively connected to resources of the host system, such as USB ports. The only flaw is that it does not support access to a firewire port. persists, I will try the XP mode. The internal emulations and "compatibilty modes" provided by the newer Windows are very hit and miss. Some of the modes that Win7 suggests after it "looks" at an old app are completely wrong; or, you sometimes intentionally run the "wrong" emulation to get something to work. The VM approach has proven so much more reliable. Good luck with it. I remember the panic felt when our new Win7 box refused to run our database program (with customer records going back to the mid 1970s) and the horror at the thought of a six month project to re-build that complex database. It was a bright and sunny day indeed when that same old database came right up in the XP environment provided by Virtualbox. Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10/11/12 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com <mailto:fra...@fsatools.com> 1-435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com NEW WEBSITE SOON! ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
Re: [Framers] Check out FrameUsers.com for everything FrameMaker!
On Mon, 29 Feb 2016, FrameUsers Admin wrote: Framers, Please pay a visit to the newly remodeled FrameUsers.com Web site (http://www.frameusers.com/). It is a simple site that provides access to everything you may need to help you work with FrameMaker. ~Find vendors of Framemaker plug-ins and add-ons Let's not forget Frank Stearns Associates, makers of IXgen, the premiere indexing tool for FrameMaker. IXgen has been around since 1994 (one of the longest-lived 3rd party developers for FrameMaker) -- and we're still alive and kicking. In fact, our own website is currently being remodeled. We might be a little hard to find, though: The Lin Sims link does not work, btw, while the Leximation link does. Frank Stearns Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10/11/12 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com <mailto:fra...@fsatools.com> 1-435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
[Framers] Nice to have the List Back
It's great to have Framers running as it should. Thanks hosters and fixers! Ever since the switch to google (so THAT was the problem) ALL Framers posts had been labeled as spam by my ISP. I had to completely disable all spam filters to get any Framers posts at all, few as they were. And the "no filter" configuration meant some 1500+ actual spam email every 24 hours. A "hello" and "nice to see you again" to all our old friends. Frank Stearns Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10/11/12 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com <mailto:fra...@fsatools.com> 1-435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com ___ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com
IXgen 7-10 Verified with FM12
Friends - We've gotten a number of queries regarding IXgen 7-10 with FM12. I hope we were able to personally reply to all who asked but just in case we missed anyone, this is a quick note to let you know all is well with IXgen 7-10 and FM12. If you're currently running IXgen 7-10 with FM10 or FM11, you'll be able to migrate IXgen to FM12 with no problems; no upgrade required. If you're running IXgen 7.2 with FM 9 or earlier FM versions and want to move to FM12, you will need to upgrade IXgen. (Contact us for upgrade information.) If you've not heard of IXgen, it's a handy collection of tools that make working with FM markers for indexing purposes much, much easier. Visit our antique website at the URL below for more information. We can even supply a fully-functional demo. Finally, a heartfelt thank you to all our users who have continued to use IXgen, now in its 20th year of release. (20 years? Where did two decades go?! w) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FrameMaker 10/11/12 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com USA Voice: 435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Re: FM 8: Index marker syntax
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, VLM TechSubs wrote: Greetings! I'm going in circles here. I have a marker of type Index with the content America:Coinage Act of 1965. This appears in the index as a line under America, indented to the second level (correct so far), but with only a page number, no text. I copied and pasted the marker content into the preceding line. I must be missing something, but I cannot figure out what. I have removed and recreated the marker from scratch, to no avail. Can someone see an error on my part here? If entered as stated, you should be fine. But, after having specialized in FM indexes for 20+ years, we have seen some odd things happen with markers... 1. Was this document originally created in Word then imported to FM? Sometimes those converted markers are dirty and contain unseen, unprintable characters that can cause odd FM behavior. BTW, there is NO CR or LF in the entry, correct? Your entry is one string, on one line in the marker? 2. Try a MIF wash. But this won't remove unwanted bad characters. It will just refresh/rebuild the object lists. 3. For fun, put a new marker, hand typed, at or near the same place (no copy and paste). Does that new entry work? 4. If you're really adventurous, save as MIF, search for the entry, and see what all might be included with that marker. (Relates to #1, above.) If all of the above fails, feel free to send us a copy of the doc for evaluation. Hope this helps, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10/11 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
RE: FM 8: Index marker syntax
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, VLM TechSubs wrote: 1. I now see that even a simple marker entry EmphasisEisphora has this problem. It appears in the correct location alphabetically, it just looks like . . . . . . 1 2. The original files were created in Word, but with no indexing. I put in 100% of these markers by hand, by myself, this week, in FrameMaker 8. In other words, they shouldn't be affected by Word or the like. FYI, the ToC works just fine. 3. I just did the following: 3.1 Shut Frame. 3.2 Relaunched Frame. 3.3 Opened book file. 3.4 Opened all files in book. Got some font and xref error messages, clicked through those. 3.5 Highlighted, then saved, all files in book. 3.6 Generated ToC and index. 3.7 Saved all files in book. 3.8 Opened index. 3.9 Found one of the offending entries, jumped to its source. It was a compound marker (2 entries in one marker). 3.10 I copied one of the entries for reference, clicked in the document a few words away, and manually typed in the text for the marker America:Income tax of 1894, just like that. 3.11 Went to book file, all files selected, save all files in book, then generate. 3.12 Entry appears in the correct location, without any text only page #, and when I jump from that page number it takes me to the new marker I just created. 3.13 So I jump there, notice that the original marker is still in place, delete it, returned to 3.7 or so, repeated the whole process, same result. 3.14 Saved the index as mif, closed it, deleted the .fm version, reopened from mif, saved as FM 8, went to book, save all files in book, generate, save all files in book, jump to index, and voila! Same result as before. Sigh ... BTW, between steps, I recall breathing. :) Frank, I am most willing and eager to try your step #4, but I've forgotten how to open the mif as text in Frame, after saving it. I know there's a way to do that, but can't recall it. We've always used a programmer's plain text editor -- even notepad or wordpad will work fine. Avoids trying to get Frame to play in a way it doesn't want to. :) This is all pretty nutty, that's for sure. A few more random thoughts... 1. The Word source still makes me cautious. If you highlight text to create a marker, or even were to use our IXgen tool to create markers, there can still be those nasty non-printing characters that would be picked up from body text and transferred into a new marker and cause problems. 1A. When you hand typed a marker, was the entry field completely clear? (Those non-printing chars can be insideous. Click next to one in the body that you can't see and the marker dialog autofill might pick it up, and you'd never know it. 2. Forgot to verify the obvious: most of the markers are working correctly, and these are just isolated cases? Or, are you seeing the same thing happen any time you have an entry with a second level and/or font change? 3. Have you done a cold restart of your system? Shut it down completely, power supply switch OFF for a few minutes, then a reboot? I know, it's crazy, however 4. In the IX file you generate, have you examined the reference pages that set up your entry formats? Are all the components there? Have you examined the entry para formats for anything odd? If you move the cursor through the entries in the main flow, do you notice if in the problem entries the para or char tag name suddenly becomes starred, indicating a deviation from the catalog settings? Finally, I have a very fuzzy memory that FM8 had introduced some bugs in marker handling... Anyone else remember this? Do you have the lastest version of FM8? Continued good luck with it!! Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10/11 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
FM 8: Index marker syntax
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, VLM TechSubs wrote: > Greetings! > I'm going in circles here. I have a marker of type Index with the > content "America:Coinage Act of 1965". This appears in the index as > a line under "America", indented to the second level (correct so > far), but with only a page number, no text. I copied and pasted the > marker content into the preceding line. I must be missing something, > but I cannot figure out what. I have removed and recreated the > marker from scratch, to no avail. Can someone see an error on my > part here? If entered as stated, you should be fine. But, after having specialized in FM indexes for 20+ years, we have seen some odd things happen with markers... 1. Was this document originally created in Word then imported to FM? Sometimes those converted markers are "dirty" and contain unseen, unprintable characters that can cause odd FM behavior. BTW, there is NO CR or LF in the entry, correct? Your entry is one string, on one line in the marker? 2. Try a "MIF wash." But this won't remove unwanted "bad" characters. It will just refresh/rebuild the object lists. 3. For fun, put a new marker, hand typed, at or near the same place (no copy and paste). Does that new entry work? 4. If you're really adventurous, save as MIF, search for the entry, and see what all might be included with that marker. (Relates to #1, above.) If all of the above fails, feel free to send us a copy of the doc for evaluation. Hope this helps, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10/11 IS HERE! *** franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com
FM 8: Index marker syntax
On Wed, 2 Oct 2013, VLM TechSubs wrote: > 1. I now see that even a simple marker entry "Eisphora" > has this problem. It appears in the "correct" location > alphabetically, it just looks like > >. . . . . . 1 > > 2. The original files were created in Word, but with no indexing. I > put in 100% of these markers by hand, by myself, this week, in > FrameMaker 8. In other words, they "shouldn't" be affected by Word > or the like. FYI, the ToC works just fine. > > 3. I just did the following: > > 3.1 Shut Frame. > 3.2 Relaunched Frame. > 3.3 Opened book file. > 3.4 Opened all files in book. Got some font and xref error messages, clicked > through those. > 3.5 Highlighted, then saved, all files in book. > 3.6 Generated ToC and index. > 3.7 Saved all files in book. > 3.8 Opened index. > 3.9 Found one of the offending entries, jumped to its source. It was > a compound marker (2 entries in one marker). > 3.10 I copied one of the entries for reference, clicked in the > document a few words away, and manually typed in the text for the > marker "America:Income tax of 1894", just like that. > 3.11 Went to book file, all files selected, save all files in book, > then generate. > 3.12 Entry appears in the correct location, without any text only > page #, and when I jump from that page number it takes me to the new > marker I just created. > 3.13 So I jump there, notice that the original marker is still in > place, delete it, returned to 3.7 or so, repeated the whole process, > same result. > 3.14 Saved the index as mif, closed it, deleted the .fm version, > reopened from mif, saved as FM 8, went to book, save all files in > book, generate, save all files in book, jump to index, and voila! > Same result as before. > > Sigh ... > > BTW, between steps, I recall breathing. :) > > Frank, I am most willing and eager to try your step #4, but I've > forgotten how to open the mif as text in Frame, after saving it. I know there's a way to do that, but can't recall it. We've always used a programmer's plain text editor -- even notepad or wordpad will work fine. Avoids trying to get Frame to play in a way it doesn't "want" to. :) This is all pretty nutty, that's for sure. A few more random thoughts... 1. The Word source still makes me cautious. If you highlight text to create a marker, or even were to use our IXgen tool to create markers, there can still be those nasty non-printing characters that would be picked up from body text and transferred into a new marker and cause problems. 1A. When you hand typed a marker, was the entry field completely clear? (Those non-printing chars can be insideous. Click next to one in the body that you can't see and the marker dialog autofill might pick it up, and you'd never know it. 2. Forgot to verify the obvious: most of the markers are working correctly, and these are just isolated cases? Or, are you seeing the same thing happen any time you have an entry with a second level and/or font change? 3. Have you done a cold restart of your system? Shut it down completely, power supply switch OFF for a few minutes, then a reboot? I know, it's crazy, however 4. In the IX file you generate, have you examined the reference pages that set up your entry formats? Are all the components there? Have you examined the entry para formats for anything odd? If you move the cursor through the entries in the main flow, do you notice if in the problem entries the para or char tag name suddenly becomes starred, indicating a deviation from the catalog settings? Finally, I have a very fuzzy memory that FM8 had introduced some bugs in marker handling... Anyone else remember this? Do you have the lastest version of FM8? Continued good luck with it!! Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10/11 IS HERE! *** franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: FrameMaker indexing frustrations
On Fri, 6 Sep 2013, Keith Soltys wrote: I've had to spend a bit of time updating some indexes in FrameMaker. Based on that, I've got two suggestions for improvements: - FrameMaker should spell check index entries in the indexing dialog box. - FrameMaker should warn you when you move out of the indexing box without saving your entry. And thank god for IXgen. I'd be climbing the walls without it. Glad we could help, Keith. The two features you note about the native marker dialog were among our original reasons for inventing IXgen. Thanks for the endorsement. :) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10/11 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
FrameMaker indexing frustrations
On Fri, 6 Sep 2013, Keith Soltys wrote: > I've had to spend a bit of time updating some indexes in FrameMaker. > Based on that, I've got two suggestions for improvements: > > - FrameMaker should spell check index entries in the indexing dialog box. > - FrameMaker should warn you when you move out of the indexing box > without saving your entry. > > And thank god for IXgen. I'd be climbing the walls without it. Glad we could help, Keith. The two features you note about the native marker dialog were among our original reasons for inventing IXgen. Thanks for the endorsement. :) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10/11 IS HERE! *** franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 435-275-8981 http://www.fsatools.com
RE: is there a way to show Index markers inline in the text
On Fri, 15 Mar 2013, Fred Wersan wrote: Gillian says: Index Tools Professional by Silicon Prairie will let you do that. Index Tools Pro actually bunches them at the top of each paragraph (unless they've changed things since I bought it some years ago). If you are handy with Framescript you can implement this feature yourself and keep the markers and index text in the paragraphs. Never saw my earlier reply get through, but IXgen too has a function to elevate marker text in-line with the body text for editing and translation. (For the most powerful marker content editing we recommend using the Editable Marker List feature of IXgen.) Marker text embedded in the body text is differentiated by the application of a character tag recognized by IXgen (you can modify the tag attributes to suite your visual need when editing markers in-line). One thing IXgen can do in this realm that other systems might not allow is creation of new marker text while editing body text. Text that you create in line then tag with that character tag recognized by IXgen will create new markers where none existed before. Hope that helps, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10/11 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
is there a way to show Index markers inline in the text
On Fri, 15 Mar 2013, Fred Wersan wrote: > Gillian says: > > Index Tools Professional by Silicon Prairie will let you do that. > > > Index Tools Pro actually bunches them at the top of each paragraph (unless > they've changed things since I bought it some years ago). If you are handy > with Framescript you can implement this feature yourself and keep the markers > and index text in the paragraphs. Never saw my earlier reply get through, but IXgen too has a function to elevate marker text in-line with the body text for editing and translation. (For the most powerful marker content editing we recommend using the "Editable Marker List" feature of IXgen.) Marker text embedded in the body text is differentiated by the application of a character tag recognized by IXgen (you can modify the tag attributes to suite your visual need when editing markers in-line). One thing IXgen can do in this realm that other systems might not allow is creation of new marker text while editing body text. Text that you create in line then tag with that character tag recognized by IXgen will create new markers where none existed before. Hope that helps, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10/11 IS HERE! *** franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: Frame 11 Appearance
Framers - Glad this topic has come up. A few months back we were invited to offer opinions to one of the engineers involved with UI design. we had a 90 minute call; I came prepared with a long list generated after only a short stint with FM11 -- my list had most of the same complaints voiced in this thread, and even a few more. Not sure how much I am able to reveal about that call (and there were some surprises in the conversation on both sides), but the point is that Adobe seems to have a genuine interest in getting this right, though I don't know how much momentum might be behind the UI as it now stands. I tried to cover that too and suggested more user configuration options for the look and feel if the standard UI didn't work for people. (There are some good starts in that direction, but they do need to be filled out.) I also suggested a little closer look at complaints about look/feel issues during beta cycles, as many of these issues had been brought up by beta testers. Adobe does monitor this list, so perhaps seeing common expressions about the same issues adds weight. Now, that doesn't mean a pile on; I think/hope they've gotten the message. But if you do have something not already noted in this thread, perhaps express it briefly, tell why it's a problem and what would make it better. My US$0.02. My opinions only. YMMV, etc. Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10/11 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Frame 11 Appearance
Framers - Glad this topic has come up. A few months back we were invited to offer opinions to one of the engineers involved with UI design. we had a 90 minute call; I came prepared with a long list generated after only a short stint with FM11 -- my list had most of the same complaints voiced in this thread, and even a few more. Not sure how much I am able to reveal about that call (and there were some surprises in the conversation on both sides), but the point is that Adobe seems to have a genuine interest in getting this right, though I don't know how much momentum might be behind the UI as it now stands. I tried to cover that too and suggested more user configuration options for the look and feel if the "standard" UI didn't work for people. (There are some good starts in that direction, but they do need to be filled out.) I also suggested a little closer look at complaints about look/feel issues during beta cycles, as many of these issues had been brought up by beta testers. Adobe does monitor this list, so perhaps seeing common expressions about the same issues adds weight. Now, that doesn't mean a "pile on;" I think/hope they've gotten the message. But if you do have something not already noted in this thread, perhaps express it briefly, tell why it's a problem and what would make it better. My US$0.02. My opinions only. YMMV, etc. Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10/11 IS HERE! *** franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: *****SPAM***** LaTeX to MIF/MML
On Mon, 14 Jan 2013, Steve Rickaby wrote: I quizzed the group about this back on '07, but the issue has come up again, so it seemed worth fishing for fresh information. Has anyone been involved in this type of conversion recently? Previous discussions seems to center around needing deep TeX and programming ability, neither of which I would have the time, patience or budget for. In decades past I did all sorts of custom filters into MIF or MML (DEC RNO, Troff/Nroff, Scribe, TeX/LaTeX, et al). It can get very messy, very fast. Said another way, very expensive. These days, cheap OCR is so good that I wonder if you might be time and money ahead to OCR the doc to RTF (having the process pick up what it can in terms of formatting), import the RTF to FM, then turn loose an intern to do clean up. (I only mention RTF because I know of no OCR system that has MIF or MML as an output option.) There's a tipping point in the page count between developing a full-on automatic converter versus a semi-automatic approach with manual clean up, which is what you'd have going the OCR route. This point will shift depending on doc complexity. YMMV. Good luck with it. (If you need a tool to index the results, give us a call. w In fact, if the conversion left you with index entries scattered in the converted body text, one of the IXgen tools could help you get them into proper FM markers.) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Re: LaTeX to MIF/MML
(oops; reposting; my email system plugged a spam warning into the subject line; might have gotten filtered downstream. If not, sorry for what would then appear to be a double post.) On Mon, 14 Jan 2013, Steve Rickaby wrote: I quizzed the group about this back on '07, but the issue has come up again, so it seemed worth fishing for fresh information. Has anyone been involved in this type of conversion recently? Previous discussions seems to center around needing deep TeX and programming ability, neither of which I would have the time, patience or budget for. In decades past I did all sorts of custom filters into MIF or MML (DEC RNO, Troff/Nroff, Scribe, TeX/LaTeX, et al). It can get very messy, very fast. Said another way, very expensive. These days, cheap OCR is so good that I wonder if you might be time and money ahead to OCR the doc to RTF (having the process pick up what it can in terms of formatting), import the RTF to FM, then turn loose an intern to do clean up. (I only mention RTF because I know of no OCR system that has MIF or MML as an output option.) There's a tipping point in the page count between developing a full-on automatic converter versus a semi-automatic approach with manual clean up, which is what you'd have going the OCR route. This point will shift depending on doc complexity. YMMV. Good luck with it. (If you need a tool to index the results, give us a call. w In fact, if the conversion left you with index entries scattered in the converted body text, one of the IXgen tools could help you get them into proper FM markers.) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as fra...@fsatools.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/franks%40fsatools.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info. ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
*****SPAM***** LaTeX to MIF/MML
On Mon, 14 Jan 2013, Steve Rickaby wrote: > I quizzed the group about this back on '07, but the issue has come > up again, so it seemed worth fishing for fresh information. Has > anyone been involved in this type of conversion recently? > > Previous discussions seems to center around needing deep TeX and > programming ability, neither of which I would have the time, > patience or budget for. In decades past I did all sorts of custom filters into MIF or MML (DEC RNO, Troff/Nroff, Scribe, TeX/LaTeX, et al). It can get very messy, very fast. Said another way, very expensive. These days, cheap OCR is so good that I wonder if you might be time and money ahead to OCR the doc to RTF (having the process pick up what it can in terms of formatting), import the RTF to FM, then turn loose an intern to do clean up. (I only mention RTF because I know of no OCR system that has MIF or MML as an output option.) There's a tipping point in the page count between developing a full-on automatic converter versus a semi-automatic approach with manual clean up, which is what you'd have going the OCR route. This point will shift depending on doc complexity. YMMV. Good luck with it. (If you need a tool to index the results, give us a call. In fact, if the conversion left you with index entries scattered in the converted body text, one of the IXgen tools could help you get them into proper FM markers.) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com
LaTeX to MIF/MML
(oops; reposting; my email system plugged a spam warning into the subject line; might have gotten filtered downstream. If not, sorry for what would then appear to be a double post.) On Mon, 14 Jan 2013, Steve Rickaby wrote: > I quizzed the group about this back on '07, but the issue has come up again, > so it seemed worth fishing for fresh information. Has anyone been involved in > this type of conversion recently? > > Previous discussions seems to center around needing deep TeX and programming > ability, neither of which I would have the time, patience or budget for. In decades past I did all sorts of custom filters into MIF or MML (DEC RNO, Troff/Nroff, Scribe, TeX/LaTeX, et al). It can get very messy, very fast. Said another way, very expensive. These days, cheap OCR is so good that I wonder if you might be time and money ahead to OCR the doc to RTF (having the process pick up what it can in terms of formatting), import the RTF to FM, then turn loose an intern to do clean up. (I only mention RTF because I know of no OCR system that has MIF or MML as an output option.) There's a tipping point in the page count between developing a full-on automatic converter versus a semi-automatic approach with manual clean up, which is what you'd have going the OCR route. This point will shift depending on doc complexity. YMMV. Good luck with it. (If you need a tool to index the results, give us a call. In fact, if the conversion left you with index entries scattered in the converted body text, one of the IXgen tools could help you get them into proper FM markers.) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as franks at fsatools.com. Send list messages to framers at lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscribe at lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/franks%40fsatools.com Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Re: How to force capital letters in a generated Index?
On Tue, 18 Dec 2012, Studio Smalbro wrote: I am generating an Index in FrameMaker 11, but the index words have been inserted in the markers with a mix of capital letters and small letters. It's a big index and I would like to be able to force all words to have the first character as a capital letter. Can I somehow tweak the paragraph style into doing this or is there any other kind of FrameMaker magic which will do the trick? Within the tool suite called IXgen, we offer a capitalization tool. Independently, for up to four levels, you can set index entry capitalization to: - all caps - all lower case - initial caps first word only - initial caps all words - initial caps on first word, then as is - initial lower case on first word, then as is - leave as is IXgen does this, and many other nifty things. (See our website, noted below, for more information.) IXgen is available for FM versions 5.5 through 10, and we will very soon have completed a few adjustments to make IXgen work with FM11. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
How to force capital letters in a generated Index?
On Tue, 18 Dec 2012, Studio Smalbro wrote: > I am generating an Index in FrameMaker 11, but the index words have been > inserted in the markers with a mix of capital letters and small letters. It's > a big index and I would like to be able to force all words to have the first > character as a capital letter. Can I somehow tweak the paragraph style into > doing this or is there any other kind of FrameMaker magic which will do the > trick? Within the tool suite called IXgen, we offer a capitalization tool. Independently, for up to four levels, you can set index entry capitalization to: - all caps - all lower case - initial caps first word only - initial caps all words - initial caps on first word, then as is - initial lower case on first word, then as is - leave as is IXgen does this, and many other nifty things. (See our website, noted below, for more information.) IXgen is available for FM versions 5.5 through 10, and we will very soon have completed a few adjustments to make IXgen work with FM11. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10 IS HERE! *** franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: How to generate an index of names without markers (or by automated insertion of markers)
On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, Kenneth C. Benson wrote: What you want is called a concordance, and I think Ixgen will do this (http://www.fsatools.com/). Someone should confirm this. I've never used it. Indeed, IXgen will do this (among many other things), but not in the traditonal sense of a concordance (we stayed away from offering conventional concordance building tools, because fairly bad indexes are often the result). That said, the best IXgen tool for this particular task would be Markers from Keywords. You would set up a list of your names, what you want to put in a marker when the name is found (by default the search string is also the marker content -- but you can change this). You can also indicate the marker type to use, which would be a good way to keep this list separate from your main index entries. You could have IXgen do this automatically, or you could have it do the process interactively, where you can see the context of each find and (a) skip it, (b) accept it and insert the new marker, (c) modify the marker text to be used at the particular find, or (d) select from a drop-down list of marker string choices that has been built from your previous on-the-fly modifications. IXgen is pretty slick with the marker creation process. Other creation tools include markers from paragraph tags and markers from character tags. IXgen is also very good at supporting your marker editing tasks, such as spell checking, unification of markers, making subentries, and so on. We invite the original poster to take a look with a fully functional demo at www.fsatools.com. (For some reason, the original post never showed up in our inbox.) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com I have received a request from a client, late in a huge book project, to generate an index with all of the names of people that are mentioned in the book. We have been supplied with a list of names and the client thinks that we can just press a button to compile the index. This is not the case of course, but the client insists that it should be done. What I am looking for is a way to locate a name in the document, find out the page number and then create an index looking like this: Adams, Douglas 42 Bradbury, Ray 451 Dumas, Alexandre 20, 45 etc. I am fairly experienced Framemaker user but I can not come up with a way of doing this without inserting (Author) markers for every instance where one of the listed names occur in the text. This would be hundreds of places, and we would have to view each page manually. I have tried my best to come up with some (semi)automated way of achieving this but the only thing I can think of would be to save the document as mif and write some sort of script that parses the text file inserting marker elements where it finds any of the listed names. Probably time consuming, and highly unsafe or at least unpredictable. My question to all you experts is if there is any way to get this done using Framemaker itself, or a plug-in for Framemaker, or using any other tool you might think of. For this project we use Framemaker 7.2. Thanks for any input, Björn Mattsson Sweden ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
How to generate an index of names without markers (or by automated insertion of markers)
On Sun, 25 Nov 2012, Kenneth C. Benson wrote: > What you want is called a concordance, and I think Ixgen will do this > (http://www.fsatools.com/). Someone should confirm this. I've never used it. Indeed, IXgen will do this (among many other things), but not in the traditonal sense of a concordance (we stayed away from offering conventional concordance building tools, because fairly bad "indexes" are often the result). That said, the best IXgen tool for this particular task would be "Markers from Keywords". You would set up a list of your names, what you want to put in a marker when the name is found (by default the search string is also the marker content -- but you can change this). You can also indicate the marker type to use, which would be a good way to keep this list separate from your main index entries. You could have IXgen do this automatically, or you could have it do the process interactively, where you can see the context of each "find" and (a) skip it, (b) accept it and insert the new marker, (c) modify the marker text to be used at the particular find, or (d) select from a drop-down list of marker string choices that has been built from your previous on-the-fly modifications. IXgen is pretty slick with the marker creation process. Other creation tools include markers from paragraph tags and markers from character tags. IXgen is also very good at supporting your marker editing tasks, such as spell checking, unification of markers, making subentries, and so on. We invite the original poster to take a look with a fully functional demo at www.fsatools.com. (For some reason, the original post never showed up in our inbox.) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10 IS HERE! *** franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com >> I have received a request from a client, late in a huge book project, to >> generate an index with all of the names of people that are mentioned in the >> book. We have been supplied with a list of names and the client thinks that >> we can just "press a button" to compile the index. This is not the case of >> course, but the client insists that it should be done. >> >> What I am looking for is a way to locate a name in the document, find out >> the page number and then create an index looking like this: >> >> Adams, Douglas 42 >> Bradbury, Ray 451 >> Dumas, Alexandre 20, 45 >> >> etc. >> >> I am fairly experienced Framemaker user but I can not come up with a way of >> doing this without inserting (Author) markers for every instance where one >> of the listed names occur in the text. This would be hundreds of places, >> and >> we would have to view each page manually. >> >> I have tried my best to come up with some (semi)automated way of achieving >> this but the only thing I can think of would be to save the document as mif >> and write some sort of script that parses the text file inserting marker >> elements where it finds any of the listed names. Probably time consuming, >> and highly unsafe or at least unpredictable. >> >> My question to all you experts is if there is any way to get this done >> using >> Framemaker itself, or a plug-in for Framemaker, or using any other tool you >> might think of. >> >> For this project we use Framemaker 7.2. >> >> Thanks for any input, >> Bj?rn Mattsson >> Sweden
Re: *****SPAM***** Re: Can Frame's default color definitions be changed?
On Wed, 17 Oct 2012, Steve Rickaby wrote: At 20:32 -0500 16/10/12, Jeremy H. Griffith wrote: ...because it was invented by IBM for the MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter)... You mean there was an *automatic* Selectric? Why didn't I know about this?? Why didn't I have one??? ;-) Automatic in one sense that the machine had been designed to be an output device -- a printer -- with the correct hardware added inside. In the mid-70s I purchased an interface kit from a third party that installed inside the Seletric. Selonoids and linkages; wires snaking through the guts. (7 selonoids could select any character on the type ball.) Took many months to get it adjusted just right, but it was glorious to have the results of work done with the primitive word processor (hosted in a 60 pound S-100 system with a whopping 32K of memory) spit out text at nearly twice the rate I could type. Interesting times. :) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
*****SPAM***** Re: Can Frame's default color definitions be changed?
On Wed, 17 Oct 2012, Steve Rickaby wrote: > At 20:32 -0500 16/10/12, Jeremy H. Griffith wrote: > >> ...because it was invented by IBM for the MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric >> Typewriter)... > > You mean there was an *automatic* Selectric? Why didn't I know about > this?? Why didn't I have one??? ;-) "Automatic" in one sense that the machine had been designed to be an output device -- a printer -- with the correct hardware added inside. In the mid-70s I purchased an interface kit from a third party that installed inside the Seletric. Selonoids and linkages; wires snaking through the guts. (7 selonoids could select any character on the type ball.) Took many months to get it adjusted just right, but it was glorious to have the results of work done with the primitive word processor (hosted in a 60 pound S-100 system with a whopping 32K of memory) spit out text at nearly twice the rate I could type. Interesting times. :) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10 IS HERE! *** franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com
RE: IXGen alive??
On Wed, 20 Jun 2012, Harding, Dan wrote: They have been having major email issues for months. Every time I send an email it goes unresponded. Your best bet is to call them by phone. Hi Dan - Yikes! Every time?? We seem to have gotten at least some messages back and forth since the beginning of the year. :) Let me know right away the next you don't get a reply from us within a few hours. We do have a long-time reputation of very fast response to emails; do let us know if you experience otherwise. Thanks, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10 IS HERE! *** fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
IXGen alive??
On Wed, 20 Jun 2012, Harding, Dan wrote: > They have been having major email issues for months. Every time I > send an email it goes unresponded. Your best bet is to call them by > phone. Hi Dan - Yikes! Every time?? We seem to have gotten at least some messages back and forth since the beginning of the year. :) Let me know right away the next you don't get a reply from us within a few hours. We do have a long-time reputation of very fast response to emails; do let us know if you experience otherwise. Thanks, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) *** IXGEN 7-10 for FRAMEMAKER 10 IS HERE! *** franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com
RE: FM grey GUI [WAS: Windows 7 - Snap]
On Thu, 3 Feb 2011, Syed Zaeem Hosain (syed.hos...@aeris.net) wrote: Totally, TOTALLY agreed! I live with it, but detest it. :( I agree as well; but these days it's easy to get seduced -- it's one downside of 16 million+ color, 1920x1280 displays. Another downside includes the well-intentioned GUI designers and marketeers who have never lived the task at hand. They might think they understand the task from their outside view, but they've never actually *worked* the task from the inside to any depth of time or experience. I was doing some design work on another SW product (non-Frame related database product, sorry!) and was thinking, h, this looks 'nice,' and I appreciated the way themes and color schemes could be managed during development. But once past initial graphical design phase and the more I started working with actual data in this environment, the more I started to dislike the graphical component because somehow, the presentation of data was losing something. I have since chucked most of the pretty and cool in favor of data intelligibility. To paraphrase Stuart, the GUI should fit the application and content; it should never, ever distract from the task at hand. YMMV. Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com -Original Message- From: framers-boun...@lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-boun...@lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Stuart Rogers Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2011 7:57 AM To: framers@lists.frameusers.com; kve...@adobe.com Subject: FM grey GUI [WAS: Windows 7 - Snap] On 03/02/2011 10:04 AM, mkopen wrote: the new grey Stalin gothic, I mean, Adobe GUI rant Bang on, Mike. I'm also addressing this message to Kapil Verma, who was recently introduced as FM's product manager. The low-contrast, monochrome GUI in FM 9 is not just butt-ugly, it's HARD TO USE. It GETS IN THE WAY. It PREVENTS ME FROM EASILY ACHIEVING MY GOALS. There may be a valid argument for low-contrast grey interfaces in programs like Illustrator and Photoshop, where the user's perception of colours in the working document could be adversely influenced by colours and contrasts in the GUI. But FM is NOT a graphics design program. The precaution of eliminating colour and contrast in the GUI, if that's what it is, is misplaced, unjustified, and highly counterproductive. Or if it's a marketing decision, originating in the imperative that Adobe products must all look the same to protect the brand, remember that Henry Ford's user-defying mantra, Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black has been discredited as a marketing strategy for an awfully long time. I strongly recommend, Kapil, that you call together the graphic designers (and marketing branders) who have obviously had overwhelming influence on this GUI, thank them for their efforts, and politely show them the door. Then get some USER INTERACTION experts and USABILITY experts on board and set them to undoing the damage that the artsy/marketsy folks have inflicted. The world (of technical writing) would be a better place. /rant Thanks, -- Stuart Rogers Technical Communicator Phoenix Geophysics Limited 3781 Victoria Park Avenue, Unit 3 Toronto, ON, Canada M1W 3K5 +1 (416) 491-7340 x 325 http://www.phoenix-geophysics.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as syed.hos...@aeris.net. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/syed.hosain%40aeris.net Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info. ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as fra...@fsatools.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/franks%40fsatools.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info. ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
FM grey GUI [WAS: Windows 7 - Snap]
On Thu, 3 Feb 2011, Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain at aeris.net) wrote: > Totally, TOTALLY agreed! > > I live with it, but detest it. :( I agree as well; but these days it's easy to get seduced -- it's one downside of 16 million+ color, 1920x1280 displays. Another downside includes the well-intentioned GUI designers and marketeers who have never "lived" the task at hand. They might think they understand the task from their outside view, but they've never actually *worked* the task from the inside to any depth of time or experience. I was doing some design work on another SW product (non-Frame related database product, sorry!) and was thinking, "h, this looks 'nice,'" and I appreciated the way "themes" and "color schemes" could be managed during development. But once past initial graphical design phase and the more I started working with actual data in this environment, the more I started to dislike the graphical component because somehow, the presentation of data was losing something. I have since chucked most of the "pretty" and "cool" in favor of data "intelligibility". To paraphrase Stuart, the GUI should fit the application and content; it should never, ever distract from the task at hand. YMMV. Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com > -Original Message- > From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at > lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Stuart Rogers > Sent: Thursday, February 03, 2011 7:57 AM > To: framers at lists.frameusers.com; kverma at adobe.com > Subject: FM grey GUI [WAS: Windows 7 - Snap] > > On 03/02/2011 10:04 AM, mkopen wrote: > > the new grey Stalin gothic, I mean, Adobe GUI > > > > Bang on, Mike. I'm also addressing this message to Kapil Verma, who was > recently introduced as FM's product manager. The low-contrast, monochrome > GUI in FM 9 is not just butt-ugly, it's HARD TO USE. It GETS IN THE WAY. It > PREVENTS ME FROM EASILY ACHIEVING MY GOALS. > > There may be a valid argument for low-contrast grey interfaces in programs > like Illustrator and Photoshop, where the user's perception of colours in the > working document could be adversely influenced by colours and contrasts in > the GUI. But FM is NOT a graphics design program. The precaution of > eliminating colour and contrast in the GUI, if that's what it is, is > misplaced, unjustified, and highly counterproductive. > > Or if it's a marketing decision, originating in the "imperative" that Adobe > products must all look the same to protect "the brand," remember that Henry > Ford's user-defying mantra, "Any customer can have a car painted any color > that he wants so long as it is black" has been discredited as a marketing > strategy for an awfully long time. > > I strongly recommend, Kapil, that you call together the graphic designers > (and marketing "branders") who have obviously had overwhelming influence on > this GUI, thank them for their efforts, and politely show them the door. > Then get some USER INTERACTION experts and USABILITY experts on board and set > them to undoing the damage that the artsy/marketsy folks have inflicted. > > The world (of technical writing) would be a better place. > > > > Thanks, > > -- > Stuart Rogers > Technical Communicator > Phoenix Geophysics Limited > 3781 Victoria Park Avenue, Unit 3 > Toronto, ON, Canada M1W 3K5 > +1 (416) 491-7340 x 325 > > http://www.phoenix-geophysics.com > ___ > > > You are currently subscribed to framers as Syed.Hosain at aeris.net. > > Send list messages to framers at lists.frameusers.com. > > To unsubscribe send a blank email to > framers-unsubscribe at lists.frameusers.com > or visit > http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/syed.hosain%40aeris.net > > Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com. Visit > http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info. > > ___ > > > You are currently subscribed to framers as franks at fsatools.com. > > Send list messages to framers at lists.frameusers.com. > > To unsubscribe send a blank email to > framers-unsubscribe at lists.frameusers.com > or visit > http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/franks%40fsatools.com > > Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com. Visit > http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info. > >
Re: Formatting of multi-marker indexes...
On Tue, 1 Feb 2011, Scott Prentice wrote: Hi... If you create an index from multiple marker types, is there a way to apply different formatting to the resulting entries from each marker type? Like, is there a way to assign one reference page to be the formatting for the Index markers and another reference page to be the formatting for the OtherIndex markers? I'm thinking the answer is no .. but wanted to check with y'all. See Richard's excellent post on this. To summarize, you'll need to embed format command information in each source marker. small commercial If you want to do this en masse, you could have IXgen selectively bring all the markers of a given type into its Editable Marker List utility, and then apply a character tag appropriate for the desired marker formatting. (In just a few mouse clicks this character tag could be applied to all the markers collected during this pass.) Then, when you apply the Editable Marker List back to the source documents, IXgen will convert the character tagging into the embedded format commands needed by FM to format marker text in the final IX document. (This character tag/embed format command conversion feature was added in IXgen 7. And, as a sanity check, you can toggle between tagging and embeded commands before you apply the marker list.) You could repeat this for each special marker type in use, assuming you had more than one othermarker type and wanted unique formatting for each. /small commercial Hope that helps, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Formatting of multi-marker indexes...
On Tue, 1 Feb 2011, Scott Prentice wrote: > Hi... > > If you create an index from multiple marker types, is there a way to apply > different formatting to the resulting entries from each marker type? Like, is > there a way to assign one reference page to be the formatting for the "Index" > markers and another reference page to be the formatting for the "OtherIndex" > markers? > > I'm thinking the answer is no .. but wanted to check with y'all. See Richard's excellent post on this. To summarize, you'll need to embed format command information in each source marker. If you want to do this en masse, you could have IXgen selectively bring all the markers of a given type into its "Editable Marker List" utility, and then apply a character tag appropriate for the desired marker formatting. (In just a few mouse clicks this character tag could be applied to all the markers collected during this pass.) Then, when you apply the Editable Marker List back to the source documents, IXgen will convert the character tagging into the embedded format commands needed by FM to format marker text in the final IX document. (This character tag/embed format command conversion feature was added in IXgen 7. And, as a sanity check, you can toggle between tagging and embeded commands before you apply the marker list.) You could repeat this for each special marker type in use, assuming you had more than one "othermarker" type and wanted unique formatting for each. Hope that helps, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: Can the spelling checker be trusted? Yes!
On Fri, 28 May 2010, Jenny Greenleaf wrote: -snips - In my file, I had a character tag used for run-in heads that was not set to US English. I had never really noticed that you can apply language to a character tag. I know now! As a FrameMaker Geezer, this should have tripped a little bell in the back of my head. D'oh! Language NONE behavior with the spell checker is actually a handy feature. You can set code examples this way so as to avoid a lot of busy work when the spell checker walks through snippets of example programming code that might be in your docs. Glad you got it fixed and found this FM feature, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to fram...@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Re: FrameMaker 3 files
On Thu, 6 May 2010, subscr...@cuff.ca wrote: Scott, I really appreciate that you tried! I've been able to resurrect some of the text using text editors, but the ideal scenario would have recovered the diagrams as well. I came late to the conversation, but sorry to say your files are probably corrupt. I recall opening FM3 files with FM5.5, and I'm pretty sure those opens even worked with FM7. (Only had a second to look on our main system here just now; found some 16 year old FM4 files that open fine in 7.2; I know we have FM2.1 and FM3 files out on optical media somewhere but did not enough time to go look at the moment). Frame has historically been fairly good about cleanly opening old version files with newer version FM, even skipping several generations, so that probably wasn't an issue in your case. The side-topic question I have (given that we're in the middle of trying find the best passive solution for long-term *reliable* storage of data) is how were these files stored? Optical media? (If so, what flavor?) Harddrives? Tape? (What flavor?) Did you have any initial difficulty copying those files from that original media? Thanks for any data points; that's mainly what we're collecting at the moment. Sorry to hear about the data loss. We all dread that! Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to fram...@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
FrameMaker 3 files
On Thu, 6 May 2010, subscribe at cuff.ca wrote: > Scott, > > I really appreciate that you tried! I've been able to resurrect some > of the text using text editors, but the ideal scenario would have > recovered the diagrams as well. I came late to the conversation, but sorry to say your files are probably corrupt. I recall opening FM3 files with FM5.5, and I'm pretty sure those opens even worked with FM7. (Only had a second to look on our main system here just now; found some 16 year old FM4 files that open fine in 7.2; I know we have FM2.1 and FM3 files out on optical media somewhere but did not enough time to go look at the moment). Frame has historically been fairly good about cleanly opening old version files with newer version FM, even skipping several generations, so that probably wasn't an issue in your case. The side-topic question I have (given that we're in the middle of trying find the best "passive" solution for long-term *reliable* storage of data) is how were these files stored? Optical media? (If so, what flavor?) Harddrives? Tape? (What flavor?) Did you have any initial difficulty copying those files from that original media? Thanks for any data points; that's mainly what we're collecting at the moment. Sorry to hear about the data loss. We all dread that! Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: Printing Index Marker Symbols and Content?
On Wed, 20 Jan 2010, Harding, Dan wrote: This may seem like an oddball request, but as part of our review process, it has been requested that there be a way to print the location (and possibly the content) of the index markers within the chapter text. That way, as reviewers are working their way through chapters, they can see at a glance whether or not a word or phrase is indexed. Due to the nature of our review process this must be on paper; an electronic solution is not viable. Being able to print the actual contents of the index marker at its location would be pure bonus (similar to the way MS Word allows you to print hidden text at a location within braces), but barring that, a simple visual representation of the index marker at its location would suffice. Hi Dan - Check out the expand markers function in the IXgen demo you just ordered. Marker text will be elevated into the main body text flow, with a character tag applied to it. You can change the particulars of that character tag to best suite your visual needs (color, size, weight, etc -- just don't rename the tag). Do note that lifting marker text into the main body text will temporarily change the pagination of your document, but I assume that's not an issue for a marker review copy. When done, you can use the IXgen collapse markers function to return the marker text to their source markers; your pagination will return to what it was before (assuming you've not made changes to the body text.) While the marker text is exposed, you can make edits to it, though for the majority of marker editing tasks, the Editable Marker List is used. (Your choice; IXgen just provides more than one way to do some things.) Often Expand Markers is used if you are doing a find/change in the body text and also want to pick up any occurrences in markers. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to fram...@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Printing Index Marker Symbols and Content?
On Wed, 20 Jan 2010, Harding, Dan wrote: > This may seem like an oddball request, but as part of our review > process, it has been requested that there be a way to print the > location (and possibly the content) of the index markers within the > chapter text. That way, as reviewers are working their way through > chapters, they can see at a glance whether or not a word or phrase > is indexed. > > Due to the nature of our review process this must be on paper; an > electronic solution is not viable. > > Being able to print the actual contents of the index marker at its > location would be pure bonus (similar to the way MS Word allows you > to print hidden text at a location within braces), but barring that, > a simple visual representation of the index marker at its location > would suffice. Hi Dan - Check out the "expand markers" function in the IXgen demo you just ordered. Marker text will be elevated into the main body text flow, with a character tag applied to it. You can change the particulars of that character tag to best suite your visual needs (color, size, weight, etc -- just don't rename the tag). Do note that lifting marker text into the main body text will temporarily change the pagination of your document, but I assume that's not an issue for a marker review copy. When done, you can use the IXgen "collapse markers" function to return the marker text to their source markers; your pagination will return to what it was before (assuming you've not made changes to the body text.) While the marker text is exposed, you can make edits to it, though for the majority of marker editing tasks, the Editable Marker List is used. (Your choice; IXgen just provides more than one way to do some things.) Often Expand Markers is used if you are doing a find/change in the body text and also want to pick up any occurrences in markers. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: Updated! List of Utilities Plugins, 3.0
On Tue, 26 May 2009, Lin Sims wrote: If you see a mistake or think I should include something that I missed, let me know and I will (eventually) make the change. IXgen is alive and well, but for some reason omitted from the PDF that I saw. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to fram...@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Updated! List of Utilities & Plugins, 3.0
On Tue, 26 May 2009, Lin Sims wrote: > If you see a mistake or think I should include something that I > missed, let me know and I will (eventually) make the change. IXgen is alive and well, but for some reason omitted from the PDF that I saw. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: Visually Identifying Marker Tags
On Mon, 9 Mar 2009, Stuart Rogers wrote: Sent on behalf of Jeff Coatsworth j...@jonassoftware.com who is having problems posting to the list. I've just been searching the Adobe FM forums and haven't had much luck finding out if there's any way for FM to better identify marker tags of varying types (like index, cross-reference, and custom Context Sensitive Help ones) with a Character format that makes them stand out for easier identification. What's the end goal in making this identification? Perhaps visual ID is an intermediate step to that end goal that might not be as critical if there's a simpler way to get to that end goal. Our marker toolset, IXgen, has a couple of different ways to view markers, including elevating marker text directly into the body text of the document, with their own character format (and you can change the formatting). Hard to miss them then! If the goal is to simply edit marker content, easily and all at once, IXgen can provide a tabular list of marker text that you can manipulate. IXgen also includes ways to create new markers, and do several other marker-related tasks. For more information visit www.fsatools.com. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to fram...@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Visually Identifying Marker Tags
On Mon, 9 Mar 2009, Stuart Rogers wrote: > Sent on behalf of Jeff Coatsworth who is having > problems posting to the list. > I've just been searching the Adobe FM forums and haven't had much luck > finding out if there's any way for FM to better identify marker tags of > varying types (like index, cross-reference, and custom Context Sensitive > Help ones) with a Character format that makes them stand out for easier > identification. What's the end goal in making this identification? Perhaps visual ID is an "intermediate step" to that end goal that might not be as critical if there's a simpler way to get to that end goal. Our marker toolset, IXgen, has a couple of different ways to view markers, including elevating marker text directly into the body text of the document, with their own character format (and you can change the formatting). Hard to miss them then! If the goal is to simply edit marker content, easily and all at once, IXgen can provide a tabular list of marker text that you can manipulate. IXgen also includes ways to create new markers, and do several other marker-related tasks. For more information visit www.fsatools.com. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: See all open markers?
On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Nancy Allison wrote: It galls me to admit this, but I really appreciate the ability to see all the hidden markers in a Word file. It enables me to see all the Index markers, for example, and quickly correct inconsistencies. Is there any clever way of doing this in Frame? Or in a MIF file? Check out the expand markers function of our IXgen plug-in for FrameMaker. See www.fsatools.com, the IXgen Central page, for a fully-functional demo. IXgen also has a number of other functions useful for index marker creation and maintenance. Has anyone made my daydream a reality? Hopefully IXgen has some of the things on your wish list, plus many more you might not have considered. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to fram...@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Re: See all open markers?
On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Nancy Allison wrote: Thanks, Rick. I've investigated -- it looks wonderful; but at $249 it's too expensive for my freelancer's budget. Is there anything else out there? Take a look at our cost analysis -- it's a little dusty but the basic numbers still work reasonably well. The tool can pay for itself rather quickly - a matter of a few days (or less) in many situations. This can be particularly useful if you're billing on a project basis rather than hourly basis. Best of luck with your freelancing. In another life I found that things got busier in down times -- not so many companies wanted to commit to staff, but still needed work done and liked the on/off ability they got with freelancers. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) fra...@fsatools.com mailto:fra...@fsatools.com TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as arch...@mail-archive.com. Send list messages to fram...@lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscr...@lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
See all open markers?
On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Nancy Allison wrote: > > It galls me to admit this, but I really appreciate the ability to see > all the hidden markers in a Word file. It enables me to see all the > Index markers, for example, and quickly correct inconsistencies. > > Is there any clever way of doing this in Frame? Or in a MIF file? Check out the "expand markers" function of our IXgen plug-in for FrameMaker. See www.fsatools.com, the "IXgen Central" page, for a fully-functional demo. IXgen also has a number of other functions useful for index marker creation and maintenance. > Has anyone made my daydream a reality? Hopefully IXgen has some of the things on your wish list, plus many more you might not have considered. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
See all open markers?
On Mon, 12 Jan 2009, Nancy Allison wrote: > > Thanks, Rick. I've investigated -- it looks wonderful; but at $249 > it's too expensive for my freelancer's budget. Is there anything else > out there? Take a look at our cost analysis -- it's a little dusty but the basic numbers still work reasonably well. The tool can pay for itself rather quickly - a matter of a few days (or less) in many situations. This can be particularly useful if you're billing on a project basis rather than hourly basis. Best of luck with your freelancing. In another life I found that things got busier in down times -- not so many companies wanted to commit to staff, but still needed work done and liked the "on/off" ability they got with freelancers. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Fixing lots of X-refs
On Wed, 31 Dec 2008, John Sgammato wrote: > A helper, buried under a huge workload, made one little mistake - > renaming a lot of chapters and their filenames to make them easier > to follow. Unfortunately, along the way a lot of x-ref markers were > lost. I don't think there is any way to undo that damage, so they > just have to be re-linked. Only 219 to go! I came in a little late on this, but if this is the case, perhaps a save to MIF, then running a good text-based search/replace (even windows wordpad will do in a pinch) to correct the path/name info would be pretty quick. Just make sure you get enough of the surrounding MIF statement to avoid unwanted substring matches... Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
RE: How to automatically import index and cross-reference entries from Word 7 to FM 7.2 or 8?
On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Lynne A. Price wrote: snips 3) Generate a list of markers with Special List Of You can also use a tool such as IXgen to see multiple piled up markers, either as a separate list or expanded into the body text. For more information please see www.fsatools.com Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
How to automatically import index and cross-reference entries from Word 7 to FM 7.2 or 8?
On Wed, 18 Jun 2008, Lynne A. Price wrote: snips > 3) Generate a list of markers with Special > List Of You can also use a tool such as IXgen to see multiple "piled up" markers, either as a separate list or expanded into the body text. For more information please see www.fsatools.com Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: IXgen Editable Marker List
On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Harold Winberg wrote: Hello Framers I have an IX gen question. When I am using the Editable Marker List, can I do anything to make the Source Document column show me more of the source doc name? I can't see enough of it to know what it is without opening it. Sure - go to the editable marker list template file (edtblist.fm, located in the ixgen\templates folder of your IXgen installation, which is in your FrameMaker installation folder). You can change fonts, doc size, orientation, and other _format_ attributes. Just don't change the number of columns in the table or make other _structural_ changes. By making the change in the template doc, this will be come the new standard for future editable marker lists. If it's just a temporary change you want for the current editable marker list you have open, make the changes to that doc. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
IXgen Editable Marker List
On Tue, 18 Mar 2008, Harold Winberg wrote: > Hello Framers > > > > I have an IX gen question. > > > > When I am using the Editable Marker List, can I do anything to make the > Source Document column show me more of the source doc name? I can't see > enough of it to know what it is without opening it. Sure - go to the editable marker list template file (edtblist.fm, located in the "ixgen\templates" folder of your IXgen installation, which is in your FrameMaker installation folder). You can change fonts, doc size, orientation, and other _format_ attributes. Just don't change the number of columns in the table or make other _structural_ changes. By making the change in the template doc, this will be come the new standard for future editable marker lists. If it's just a temporary change you want for the current editable marker list you have open, make the changes to that doc. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: unavailable fonts problem: URGENT (Bill Swallow)
On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Bill Swallow wrote: Hey, how'd I get in the subject line??? ;-) I agree that blowing out the text in MIF is drastic, though it'll definitely solve the problem. Editing the MIF to replace the offending font name with another one is a better route. Still, the 'remember missing font names' quick fix will work to produce a PDF in a pinch. On Feb 7, 2008 10:24 AM, Combs, Richard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Miriam Boral wrote: Save the offending file as .mif and then open the .mif file with a text editor to view the underlying code. Search for the missing font and delete the text that uses it. Save the file and then resave as .fm. This is the only foolproof solution I've found! We've found over the years that sometimes the internal mazes of the object lists that make up an FM doc can leave you with no way back. As an example, it's possible to get stale font information lodged inside a table with NO WAY via the user interface to get to it. At that point, a MIF edit is the only way to get to that stale font. Doesn't happen very often, but it can be frustrating when it does. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
"unavailable fonts" problem: URGENT (Bill Swallow)
On Thu, 7 Feb 2008, Bill Swallow wrote: > Hey, how'd I get in the subject line??? ;-) > > I agree that blowing out the text in MIF is drastic, though it'll > definitely solve the problem. Editing the MIF to replace the offending > font name with another one is a better route. Still, the 'remember > missing font names' quick fix will work to produce a PDF in a pinch. > > On Feb 7, 2008 10:24 AM, Combs, Richard wrote: >> Miriam Boral wrote: >> >>> Save the offending file as .mif and then open the .mif file with a >>> text editor to view the underlying code. Search for the missing font >>> and delete the text that uses it. Save the file and then >>> resave as .fm. >>> >>> This is the only foolproof solution I've found! We've found over the years that sometimes the internal mazes of the object lists that make up an FM doc can leave you with no way back. As an example, it's possible to get "stale" font information lodged inside a table with NO WAY via the user interface to get to it. At that point, a MIF edit is the only way to get to that stale font. Doesn't happen very often, but it can be frustrating when it does. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
RE: Alphabetizing a generated list of Figures or Tables
On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Combs, Richard wrote: Pete Rourke wrote: I started from the book addList of Figures using the paragraph tag, Caption, but I have not figured out how to put this into the reference page (like what the standard index does) to do the alphabetical sorting. snips You can make your own index of figures, but it's a bit of work. In each Caption pgf, you need to insert a marker. Either define a custom Marker Type for the purpose -- say, Figure -- or use one of the built-in types that you don't currently use -- say, Subject or Comment. The Marker Text for each marker should be what you want in the index. If it's the complete text of the Caption pgf, just select it all and FM puts it in the Marker Text box of the Marker dialog. (This entire process could be scripted, of course.) Or, you could use IXgen to do this in just a few moments. You can create markers from specific para tags, such as those used for the captions; and you can create markers of whatever type you wanted (including those you define yourself). This would make later collection and modification very simple and fast. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Alphabetizing a generated list of Figures or Tables
On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Combs, Richard wrote: > Pete Rourke wrote: > >> I started from the book add>List of > Figures using the >> paragraph tag, Caption, but I have not figured out how to put >> this into the reference page (like what the standard index >> does) to do the alphabetical sorting. snips > You can make your own index of figures, but it's a bit of work. In each > Caption pgf, you need to insert a marker. Either define a custom Marker > Type for the purpose -- say, "Figure" -- or use one of the built-in > types that you don't currently use -- say, "Subject" or "Comment." The > Marker Text for each marker should be what you want in the index. If > it's the complete text of the Caption pgf, just select it all and FM > puts it in the Marker Text box of the Marker dialog. (This entire > process could be scripted, of course.) Or, you could use IXgen to do this in just a few moments. You can create markers from specific para tags, such as those used for the captions; and you can create markers of whatever type you wanted (including those you define yourself). This would make later collection and modification very simple and fast. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
RE: Index markers not showing in generated index
On Mon, 21 Jan 2008, Pete Rourke wrote: Thanks Stuart, I've tried both with and without spaces. What is funny is that Index Marker = Items;$nopageViolation:Items The Items shows up in the Index, but the Violation:Items does not. In the Index, there are 15 secondary items that do work under the primary Violation, I just can't get the word Items as a secondary even if the Did you by chance source any of this document from Word? If so (and in general with squirrely marker behavior) it's often worth an export to MIF and an examination of the marker statements. In the past we've found odd, non-printing characters that should not be in the marker, and these can cause fits. Word is infamous for putting in leading and trailing hex 20 (or was it decimal 20 - can't remember) characters - invisible on screen and paper, but confusing for FM's marker parser. Give that a shot. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Re: QA wants unique edition number in changed footers
On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Andersen, Verner Engell VEA wrote: All my FM book files contain all master pages, all variables, all reference pages etc. This means that if you accidentially copy formats from one file to anoter nothing will go wrong. My edition number in the footer is simply a global variable. Now the QA Department wants each chapter to have an editon number according to when changes were made. This means that some chapters have edition k, others edition l and so forth. Have you any idea of how I can have the various edition numbers in footer of each chapter page and still have the possibility of importing all formats from all files without messing things up? I routinely use what I call a reference or resource file. It's not part of the printed book, but other files cross-reference to this file for various bits of info, such as version info, part #, etc. You could list your edition info for each chapter in such an external file, then in each chapter doc xref to this reference doc to pick up the appropriate info for the footer. If something changes, you simply make a content change in the ref doc and regen the book, rather than copying formats around. Doesn't take too much to set it up, and I always had more confidence in this approach rather than copying vars around because as you noted above, it's easy to break something by copying formats. Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
QA wants unique edition number in changed footers
On Wed, 31 Jan 2007, Andersen, Verner Engell VEA wrote: > All my FM book files contain all master pages, all variables, all > reference pages etc. This means that if you accidentially copy formats > from one file to anoter nothing will go wrong. > > My edition number in the footer is simply a global variable. Now the QA > Department wants each chapter to have an editon number according to when > changes were made. This means that some chapters have edition k, others > edition l and so forth. > > Have you any idea of how I can have the various edition numbers in > footer of each chapter page and still have the possibility of importing > all formats from all files without messing things up? I routinely use what I call a "reference" or "resource" file. It's not part of the printed book, but other files cross-reference to this file for various bits of info, such as version info, part #, etc. You could list your edition info for each chapter in such an external file, then in each chapter doc xref to this reference doc to pick up the appropriate info for the footer. If something changes, you simply make a content change in the ref doc and regen the book, rather than copying formats around. Doesn't take too much to set it up, and I always had more confidence in this approach rather than copying vars around because as you noted above, it's easy to break something by copying formats. Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: First Time Indexer
On Fri, 12 Jan 2007, Fabio Di Francesco wrote: Hi All, First time generating an index with FM. First of all: how do you get the index to show all the pages that contain a specific marked word? Example: I've marked the word DIP switch on page 5 and the word also appears on pages 20, 26, and 30. When I generate the index, it only shows page number 5. Do you have to go through the entire document and mark the same words over and over again? That would seem illogical. Actually, you WANT the control to select/reject occurrences of each potential item to index. If you don't and instead hit every occurrence of a word or phrase, you wind up with one of those virtually useless things called a concordance. (A concordance can occasionally have limited value, but it is *not* an index.) You might want to spend a little time finding out more about indexing in general. One good place to start is www.asindexing.org -- lots of good resources and information there. Also, we offer IXgen, a toolset that supports indexing in FrameMaker. Our website is listed below. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
First Time Indexer
On Fri, 12 Jan 2007, Fabio Di Francesco wrote: > Hi All, > > First time generating an index with FM. > > First of all: how do you get the index to show all the pages that contain a > specific marked word? Example: I've marked the word DIP switch on page 5 and > the word also appears on pages 20, 26, and 30. When I generate the index, it > only shows page number 5. Do you have to go through the entire document and > mark the same words over and over again? That would seem illogical. Actually, you WANT the control to select/reject occurrences of each potential item to index. If you don't and instead hit every occurrence of a word or phrase, you wind up with one of those virtually useless things called a concordance. (A concordance can occasionally have limited value, but it is *not* an index.) You might want to spend a little time finding out more about indexing in general. One good place to start is www.asindexing.org -- lots of good resources and information there. Also, we offer IXgen, a toolset that supports indexing in FrameMaker. Our website is listed below. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: Some Pointers for IXgen
On Thu, 4 Jan 2007, John Posada wrote: Hi, guys...this will be the first time I'm using IXgen to generate a set of index sections. Let me know if what I want to do is unreasonable. My document set contains about eight book, with four of them over (or close to over) 200 pages. I want to generate an index for each book...don't worry, I don't want a master index (at least not yet). However, I want to apply the same list of words and phrases against each book. What I envision is to index each book, then merge the words and phrases into one master list. When it comes time to gen the index, use the same list for each book. This sound reasonable? I'm going to be studying the manual. However, in the mean time, can someone give me a very highlevel description of how I'll approach this? Quite reasonable, and you can mix and match the IXgen tools to accomplish this. If you go to the section in the IXgen User's Guide entitled Suggested IXgen Uses (Cookbook) you'll find several short step by step procedures for real-world use of IXgen. You don't have to be an expert IXgen user to go through these procedures. You might start with the procedure from Making an Index from Scratch on one book, then you could try Making a Keyword List from an Existing Index to get you going with the other books. Those are all fairly high level in their explanations (they're cookbook procedures, after all), plus you'll have an index when you're done. Just be aware of the limitations of an index produced by keyword only methods -- as time allows, you'll want to massage the index for *each* book to get something that will make your readers smile. You might want to try out a few things on a scatch copy of one of the books until you get the hang of things. Hope that helps, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Some Pointers for IXgen
On Thu, 4 Jan 2007, John Posada wrote: > Hi, guys...this will be the first time I'm using IXgen to generate a > set of index sections. Let me know if what I want to do is > unreasonable. > > My document set contains about eight book, with four of them over (or > close to over) 200 pages. I want to generate an index for each > book...don't worry, I don't want a master index (at least not yet). > However, I want to apply the same list of words and phrases against > each book. > > What I envision is to index each book, then merge the words and > phrases into one master list. When it comes time to gen the index, > use the same list for each book. > > This sound reasonable? I'm going to be studying the manual. However, > in the mean time, can someone give me a very highlevel description of > how I'll approach this? Quite reasonable, and you can mix and match the IXgen tools to accomplish this. If you go to the section in the IXgen User's Guide entitled "Suggested IXgen Uses (Cookbook)" you'll find several short "step by step" procedures for real-world use of IXgen. You don't have to be an expert IXgen user to go through these procedures. You might start with the procedure from "Making an Index from Scratch" on one book, then you could try "Making a Keyword List from an Existing Index" to get you going with the other books. Those are all fairly "high level" in their explanations (they're cookbook procedures, after all), plus you'll have an index when you're done. Just be aware of the limitations of an index produced by "keyword only" methods -- as time allows, you'll want to massage the index for *each* book to get something that will make your readers smile. You might want to try out a few things on a scatch copy of one of the books until you get the hang of things. Hope that helps, Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: Frank Stearns
On Wed, 13 Dec 2006, Rick Henkel wrote: Does anyone have a second e-mail address for Frank? When I send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED], the message comes back undeliverable. Frank, are you out there? Yes!!! We are still here. May all spammers die a hideous death. It seems our ISP has been having mail server problems because of them. (Sheer volumes of this junk has overwhelmed one of the oldest and most reliable ISPs in our area.) You can also try our direct ISP address of [EMAIL PROTECTED] Calling is fine too, but just discovered that our answering system is not working properly, and I'm scrambling to find another solution there, too. Sigh. Isn't technology wonderful? (When it works.) Apologies to anyone who has tried to reach us without success, though some messages have been getting through. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Frank Stearns
On Wed, 13 Dec 2006, Rick Henkel wrote: > Does anyone have a second e-mail address for Frank? When I send mail > to franks at fsatools.com, the message comes back undeliverable. > > Frank, are you out there? Yes!!! We are still here. May all spammers die a hideous death. It seems our ISP has been having mail server problems because of them. (Sheer volumes of this junk has overwhelmed one of the oldest and most reliable ISPs in our area.) You can also try our direct ISP address of franks at pacifier.com. Calling is fine too, but just discovered that our answering system is not working properly, and I'm scrambling to find another solution there, too. Sigh. Isn't technology wonderful? (When it works.) Apologies to anyone who has tried to reach us without success, though some messages have been getting through. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
RE: Re: Indexing recommendations
On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Guy K. Haas wrote: Thanks for the elaboration, Frank. Have you considered making a configuration option for IXgen that would enable the user of such third-party tools to turn off the [ balancing? Yes -- that is indeed the conceptual plan. Problem is, within IXgen there several ways this could be done and several different places where it could be done. Even for a very simple change like this, UI and coding permutations expand rather quickly, and then one must be very careful. We elected to roll this into a future IXgen release, when a regular development/testing cycle would be in place. I also recall now that when this issue came up with one of Rick's clients, we provided a n/c IXgen 5.5 license for them to use when TimeSavers would be downstream. Bracket processing was added in IXgen 7 to support several new features of IXgen. At that time we were not even aware of TimeSavers. As an indication of the rarity of the problem, more than three years of IXgen 7's release passed by before the issue surfaced. Hope that clarifies a bit more. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Indexing recommendations
On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Rick Quatro wrote: > IXgen used to be the gold standard for manipulating FrameMaker markers, and > one that I used to heartily recommend. There are two things that soured me on > IXgen: > > 1) Upgrade prices are quite high, especially if you only use it occasionally. Rick, you're not doing the full calculation. IXgen carries a **five year** performance warranty (mostly unheard of in the software industry). Said another way, there is no "annual maintenance fee" or leaving the users high and dry. You pay more, but you also get much, much more. > 2) IXgen may alter your marker contents, for example, by adding a ] to > balance an opening [. This may be fine for Index markers, but may be And index marker processing IS the primary focus of IXgen -- not specialized syntax for some other third-party product. > inappropriate for other marker types. For example, if you use IXgen with > TimeSavers, you will not want anything added to your Hypertext markers. Many > TimeSavers Hypertext markers have a [ in them that should not be balanced. > IXgen should have a setting to prevent modification of your marker content, > but it doesn't. The answer here is simple -- if you're one of the very small number of IXgen users who work with the TimeSavers product, *don't* use IXgen to process hypertext markers!! (Of course you can still use IXgen for index and other marker types that contribute to the index.) We are looking at ways to accommodate TimeSavers, but we are unwilling to risk breaking indexing features that are very helpful to 99.999% of our users. > For these reasons, I hesitate to recommend IXgen to my clients. Admitting our bias, we do recommend IXgen for these reasons: (a) feature set (b) warranty (c) long-term performance & history of our company and the product. For a fully-functional demo, please visit the IXgen Central portion of www.fsatools.com Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Indexing recommendations
On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Guy K. Haas wrote: > Thanks for the elaboration, Frank. > Have you considered making a configuration option for IXgen that would enable > the user of such third-party tools to turn off the "[" balancing? Yes -- that is indeed the conceptual plan. Problem is, within IXgen there several ways this could be done and several different places where it could be done. Even for a very "simple" change like this, UI and coding permutations expand rather quickly, and then one must be very careful. We elected to roll this into a future IXgen release, when a regular development/testing cycle would be in place. I also recall now that when this issue came up with one of Rick's clients, we provided a n/c IXgen 5.5 license for them to use when TimeSavers would be downstream. Bracket processing was added in IXgen 7 to support several new features of IXgen. At that time we were not even aware of TimeSavers. As an indication of the rarity of the problem, more than three years of IXgen 7's release passed by before the issue surfaced. Hope that clarifies a bit more. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: Solution NOT SOLVED Phantom Index Entries
On Thu, 3 Aug 2006, Murray Moore wrote: I can not delete the cause in the fm files that is the source of the This is very peculiar... has to be an explanation somewhere! :) Are you by chance pulling your files across a network? Perhaps stale or out-of-sync files are being moved around. (Many of the old network/FM problems of the past have been solved by better network sw in recent years, but one never knows when something might perhaps be out of adjustment or broken.) If you'd like to send us a sample file I'll take a look at this B-grade SciFi/horror movie of the marker that won't go away. After nearly 2 decades of working with MIF have never heard of anything like this (other than file sync issues). What you describe has gotten me rather curious. If you elect to do this, send the original problematic binary file, not the MIF version you created. Thanks, Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Solution NOT SOLVED Phantom Index Entries
On Thu, 3 Aug 2006, Murray Moore wrote: > I can not delete the cause in the fm files that is the source of the This is very peculiar... has to be an explanation somewhere! :) Are you by chance pulling your files across a network? Perhaps stale or out-of-sync files are being moved around. (Many of the old network/FM problems of the past have been solved by better network sw in recent years, but one never knows when something might perhaps be out of adjustment or broken.) If you'd like to send us a sample file I'll take a look at this B-grade SciFi/horror movie of the marker that won't go away. After nearly 2 decades of working with MIF have never heard of anything like this (other than file sync issues). What you describe has gotten me rather curious. If you elect to do this, send the original problematic binary file, not the MIF version you created. Thanks, Frank Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Phantom index entries (fwd)
(oops -- I forgot to reply to the list... Sorry, David, for the dbl post to you! -Frank Stearns) On Thu, 3 Aug 2006, Stamm, David-P45904 wrote: > Try this. > > 1. By whatever means, go to the marker that you believe is the > offender. The marker appears highlighted. Remember that the marker Maybe I missed something here, but you can also always turn on hypertext linking when doing a generate/update. Then from the new index doc go to the whacky entries and control-alt-click on their page numbers one by one -- the control-alt-click will jump you back to the source doc and that marker will be selected, whether you can see the selection or not. Press DEL. Unless it really is the horror marker from Brimstone Regions, it oughtta go away. If not, we'd still like to see the doc. (One shameless plug of a side note: IXgen can make clustered markers very easy to see, either in context in the body text, or in a sorted or unsorted listing document that you can edit and then "return" to the source markers.) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
Re: Phantom index entries
On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, Murray Moore wrote: FM 6.0p405 XP Pro Version 2002 Service Pack 2 In my book's index, page numbers are appearing under the Symbols heading; 16, 18, 24, etc. I traced each of these numbers to its source index marker, e.g. one of the page numbers under the Symbols heading, 34, is the A Year Ago This Month button heading on page 34. On page 34 I deleted and recreated the index marker. But when I updated the book and the index, 34 continues to display under Symbols. On page 34 I deleted the index marker. I updated the book and the index. Not only does 16 continue to display under Symbols, but A Year Ago This Month 34 continues to display under the A heading. Our IT Dept. head suggested I might have exceeded the maximum size for a FM file. I do not think so because I have produced thicker books. Were the source files perhaps originally created in MS word? We've seen such markers sourced in word as having a leading and trailing char 020 -- it's a non-printing char, but one that FM sees when the index is generated (and thus the entry under Symbols). About the only way to check (and fix) is to save the doc as MIF, search for the text of the affected markers, then check the MIF statements of each affected marker for numerical character values that don't belong. Delete them (careful not to break the structure of the MIF -- check to see what a good marker looks like if you're not sure), save the MIF doc, reload into FM to convert back to FM binary form (overwrite the original FM file), and regen your index. The problem should then be gone. Hope that helps. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Re: No MIF (was Phantom index entries
On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, Murray Moore wrote: When one thing doesn't work, often it seems other things also do not work. I have saved the chapter two ways: * File ~ Save As... ~ Save as type MIF (*.mif) This is the one you want. But neither method has produced a text file, just a copy of the FM file with a .mif extension. That's odd... the file is actually in binary format? What happens if you bring it into a plain text editor, such as wordpad? If it really is an FM binary, AND you actually did select the save-as mif option, something is broken. But don't try to open the MIF save in FM, as it will convert it right back to an FM doc. Use a plain text editor to open the MIF version. (There might have been a way to prevent FM from doing this auto convert of mif on open, but durned if I can remember it now.) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com ___ You are currently subscribed to Framers as [EMAIL PROTECTED] Send list messages to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/archive%40mail-archive.com Send administrative questions to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
Phantom index entries
On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, Murray Moore wrote: > FM 6.0p405 > XP Pro Version 2002 Service Pack 2 > > In my book's index, page numbers are appearing under the Symbols > heading; 16, 18, 24, etc. > > I traced each of these numbers to its source index marker, e.g. one of > the page numbers under the Symbols heading, 34, is the A Year Ago This > Month button heading on page 34. > > On page 34 I deleted and recreated the index marker. But when I updated > the book and the index, 34 continues to display under Symbols. > > On page 34 I deleted the index marker. I updated the book and the index. > Not only does 16 continue to display under Symbols, but A Year Ago This > Month 34 continues to display under the A heading. > > Our IT Dept. head suggested I might have exceeded the maximum size for a > FM file. I do not think so because I have produced thicker books. Were the source files perhaps originally created in MS word? We've seen such markers sourced in word as having a leading and trailing char 020 -- it's a non-printing char, but one that FM sees when the index is generated (and thus the entry under "Symbols"). About the only way to check (and fix) is to save the doc as MIF, search for the text of the affected markers, then check the MIF statements of each affected marker for numerical character values that don't belong. Delete them (careful not to break the structure of the MIF -- check to see what a good marker looks like if you're not sure), save the MIF doc, reload into FM to convert back to FM binary form (overwrite the original FM file), and regen your index. The problem should then be gone. Hope that helps. Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
No MIF (was Phantom index entries
On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, Murray Moore wrote: > When one thing doesn't work, often it seems other things also do not work. > > I have saved the chapter two ways: > * File ~> Save As... ~> Save as type MIF (*.mif) This is the one you want. > But neither method has produced a text file, just a copy of the FM file > with a .mif extension. That's odd... the file is actually in binary format? What happens if you bring it into a plain text editor, such as wordpad? If it really is an FM binary, AND you actually did select the save-as mif option, something is broken. But don't try to open the MIF save in FM, as it will convert it right back to an FM doc. Use a plain text editor to open the MIF version. (There might have been a way to prevent FM from doing this auto convert of mif on open, but durned if I can remember it now.) Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r) franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com> TOLL FREE Voice (USA and Canada): 800-567-6421 USA Voice: 360-892-3970 USA FAX: 360-253-1498 http://www.fsatools.com
