Adobe licensing: the gift that keeps on giving

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I am writing this to warn you about a licensing issue that could cause you
great pain. This is about tcs 3.5.

Adobes perpetual license, which I have, states that the license may only be
activated on no more than two computers. However, it doesn't specify what a
computer means which is really important here.

The screen on my laptop had gone bad. I got a new computer shell and moved
my hard drive from the old shell to the new shell. This counted as a new
computer from the license servers point of view because while it was the
same hardware specs various things were different such as the MAC address.

Customer support informed me that this was documented on the adobe web
site. It's not. I asked if they could clear out the bad activation. They
say that's impossible but they could make an exception.

I am relieved that I can still use the license but be warned: if you plan
change the hardware make sure to deactivate the license before you do.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Every coin has two sides WAS: Part 1: Why I am Dropping TCS and FrameMaker

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Diane,

Thank you for your constructive feedback. I in fact have considered the 
points you raised. I just didn't think it feasible to cover every aspect of 
my decision making process in my original post. I'll go ahead and address 
them now.

*1.  No automation.*

I am actually intimately familiar with FM automation and have several 
plugins, some of which i have written myself. I actually think the model 
where "FM has a deficiency in functionality and usability therefore get a 
custom plugin" is fraught with risk and ongoing costs that many people do 
not consider. However, I think there's a larger problem with how you framed 
this issue. I am not arguing that doing things manually is the superior way 
of doing things. Clearly, automation is what should happen here. The 
question isn't if but how.  If you take FrameMaker as a given, then I 
absolutely agree that a plugin for automation would be a slam dunk case in 
terms of ROI. However, I am looking at this more broadly. 

I am asking the following questions: 


   - What is the best tool for doing the publication automation that I 
   need? 
   - What is the most cost effective way to do this automation?

Flare's license cost is identical to FrameMaker's. Flare already does all 
of the automation I need out of the box. It is fully scriptable and can be 
integrated into a build process and if there's a problem with the 
functionality I get to raise it to the vendor instead of tracking down some 
contractor. By definition, FM+plugins is going to be more expensive.  On 
top of this, why would I want to automate the generation of PDFs in 
FrameMaker, when PDF output is not needed?
*2. FM is definitely not dying
*I don't think I ever claimed that FrameMaker was "dying" in the sense that 
everyone would stop using it and that Adobe would end of life the product. 
If I did, then that was not my intention and I apologize for the confusion. 
 I do expect that its market share is going to shrink more and more over 
time as people stop using PDF as one of their primary outputs or at all. I 
am sure FM will survive on for many years to come due to the number of 
legacy installs and organizational inertia. I simply don't understand what 
the use case for FM is if you don't care about producing PDFs. And yes, I 
know people predict disruptive change that never happens but there was a 
time that everyone "knew" that you had to product printed 
documentationuntil you didn't. I expect the same is going to happen 
with PDFs though I could certainly be wrong. 

*3. Adobe is not going away.*
As a company, I am sure that's true. I don't recall making any comments on 
whether the company would survive or not. I directed my criticisms towards 
their product suite. 

*4. Adobe Support
*I agree that many places have horrible customer support. But not all. I'll 
get this into my next post but Madcap Flare's customer support is hands 
down phenomenal. I can't say good enough things about them. They are so 
amazing that I was literally in shock dealing with "tier 1" agents that 
actually knew what they were doing and were actually investing in help me 
with my problem. And oh dear lord, you actually call a number, press a 
single button and you actually start talking to a human being. I never 
imagined!! 

*5. Information hard to find.*
*
*
*"*This is like blaming the gun instead of the shooter.  Sorry, but it's 
just not valid. The problem here is the design of the documentation, not 
the tools."

On this one, I agree and I disagree.  I agree that the design of the 
documentation needs improvement. I disagree that the tool is irrelevant in 
implementing that redesign. In fact, that's one of the most important 
reasons I switched tools!!  I am in fact a subject matter expert on the 
product, I actually worked part time in customer support, and I am 
considered one of the most knowledgeable people in the entire org about the 
overall system architecture. Furthermore, I know the redesign I want to 
achieve.

Having a good design matters a lot, but whether a tool is good for 
implementing that design is an empirical question that must be 
investigated. Not every problem out there is a nail that should be beaten 
with a FrameMaker hammer.  FM is a tool. It has strengths and weaknesses. 
Its biggest strength is making it easy to author content that can be easily 
outputted into high quality PDFs. On the other hand, I do not think FM is 
the most cost effective and best tool for doing topic based authoring in a 
XML environment in which the final output is HTML5 help. In fact, unless 
generating PDF output is one of your primary goals, then I don't understand 
why you would use FM.

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Part 1: Why I am Dropping TCS and FrameMaker

[Joseph Lorenzini]

I had originally offered to share my story offline with anyone who is
interested. However, the outpouring of interest (i think 30 or 40 people
emailed me) and the urging of several to post this to the forum has changed
my decision. So here it is.

For those on the FM list, I suspect the formatting in this email is going
to get stripped out and make it hard to read. Just email me if you want a
copy that's easier to read.

Note that I am actually going to have three posts because of how long this
will be. One that discusses why I am dropping FM and TCS, another about why
I chose Flare, and then a final post that describes how I converted from FM
to Flare.

Before I proceed, I should note that everything  I am expressing here are
my own opinions and experiences. This is based on my use case and what
worked for me. Some or all of what I have written may not apply to you or
your work situation. I don't want anyone to think that I am criticizing
their choices. I am not passing judgment on you and how you do technical
communication. I am just sharing my story because I think it may help some
people with their work.

To summarize what I am going to talk about (because I am afraid this will
be quite long):

   - My Business Case
   - Why FM failed to meet that Business Case
   - Why Not RoboHelp?


*SECTION 1: Business Case*

When you have a reasonably large documentation set (approximately 50 pdfs
and 3,000 pages), changing the tool you use and how you and your team
author content is an expensive decision, especially in the short term.  Off
the top of my head:

   - the up front conversion cost is going to be at least 160 hours (1
   month) or more of work even with automation tools. In all honesty, if you
   aren't budgeting for at least one person to work full time on conversion
   for 4 to 6 weeks, then you aren't being realistic.
   - training on the new tool for all the people in the tech pubs department
   - training SMEs on how to do reviews with the new tool
   - cost of the software itself (usually going to be at least a couple
   thousand dollars) and that's on the low end
   - learning and implementing a new publication process
   - Localization costs -- Among other things there's a risk that the
   translation memory can no longer be used as is.

I am sure I have missed others. When you add up all the hours and money
spent, you are easily talking about a 10,000 to 15,000 dollar investment.

I needed a compelling business case that would *justify *that investment.

And with that let me start with the following customer complaint. I am
paraphrasing.

*You have so many PDFs. I have no idea, which PDF I should look in for the
information that I need to know. I have to download a huge zip from your
website, open each individual PDF, and then do my search in that PDF. Can
you please just give me a single place to search for and find what I am
looking for?*

*
*
And then there was another problem that the PDF deliverables were causing
customer support. Frequently, customers would open up tickets about a
problem they were having and it would turn out that this issue was 1)
covered in one of the PDFs 2) would resolve the customer support ticket.
The customer support person then had the burden of trying to hunt down this
information or asking me where it was. The customer support team in other
words had a similar complaint as the customer: we want an easy way to find
a particular procedure or section and then provide that content to the
customer.

 It became clear to me that:

   1. No one had a desire to or would read the PDFs as a book i.e. a linear
   narrative. Technical content is boring, people are busy. They just want to
   get the information that they need to get their work done. They are
   completely uninterested in reading a 400 page user guide from end to end.
   2. The *only *thing someone wanted to do  was have a google search like
   facility that would search all the content and then return the information
   they wanted.
   3. The idea that people don't read end user documentation is not true.
   If it was, then no one would be complaining about their inability to find
   content. The fact that they are searching through the documentation
   indicates a desire and a need they think documentation can fulfill.
   4. They want something that is fast to search, easy to access, and easy
   to view content.
   5. And what they were searching could be boiled down to the following
   two questions: What is it or what does this mean? And how do I do that? In
   other words, concepts and procedures.

H, did someone say topic based authoring? Well, if they didn't, I did.


If I switched to topic based authoring (which of course would mean a
significant restructuring and rewriting of legacy content) and I provided
all content in a single package, then that would address the usability
complaints raised by customers and customer support.

Right off the bat this would reduce customer support costs (less 

So Long and Thanks for the Fish -- Migrating from FrameMaker to Flare

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have used FrameMaker for over 5 years. I have used it to produce
thousands of pages of documentation. And I honestly thought that FM was a
great tool...for a time. Plus, the community was super helpful.

So its with some regret that I am telling you that I am leaving this
community and the TCS suite. I am adopting Flare as a replacement. Please
note I am no evangelist of Flare nor do I think that there's One Right
Tool. FrameMaker can be a great solution for some and if works for you then
great. The reasons why I made this choice were driven by a specific
business and use case

There are many reasons for this but that would cause this post to grow
quite large and I didn't want to flood this community with a gigantic post
about why I am not using its tool anymore.

That said, my experience of why and how i migrated may be of interest to
others in this forum. If you'd like a detailed explanation and are curious
to learn more, I would be happy to share those details with you offline.
Feel free to email me.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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So Long and Thanks for the Fish -- Migrating from FrameMaker to Flare

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have used FrameMaker for over 5 years. I have used it to produce
thousands of pages of documentation. And I honestly thought that FM was a
great tool...for a time. Plus, the community was super helpful.

So its with some regret that I am telling you that I am leaving this
community and the TCS suite. I am adopting Flare as a replacement. Please
note I am no evangelist of Flare nor do I think that there's One Right
Tool. FrameMaker can be a great solution for some and if works for you then
great. The reasons why I made this choice were driven by a specific
business and use case

There are many reasons for this but that would cause this post to grow
quite large and I didn't want to flood this community with a gigantic post
about why I am not using its tool anymore.

That said, my experience of why and how i migrated may be of interest to
others in this forum. If you'd like a detailed explanation and are curious
to learn more, I would be happy to share those details with you offline.
Feel free to email me.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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RE: Windows 7 + FrameMaker 11 = BOOM!

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Ken,

One option that you have is to put your files in a SVN repository. If you
do this, then checked out files will be local to the person's computer and
there's no issue with network latency etc.  You can certainly do the check
out to an external hard drive to if that's needed. Once the user is done
modifying the files, they just commit them with a click of a button to the
repository.

I have been using SVN with FrameMaker for years and its worked fine without
a problem. I love it because none of the network latency issues that are
associated with later versions of Frame affect you -- because the network
is almost completely removed from the equation. It also makes working over
VPN a breeze, where i'd rather eat broken class then try to edit FM files
on a NFS through VPN.

If you want additional details, let me know.

Sincerely
Joesph Lorenzini
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Windows 7 + FrameMaker 11 = BOOM!

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Ken,

One option that you have is to put your files in a SVN repository. If you
do this, then checked out files will be local to the person's computer and
there's no issue with network latency etc.  You can certainly do the check
out to an external hard drive to if that's needed. Once the user is done
modifying the files, they just commit them with a click of a button to the
repository.

I have been using SVN with FrameMaker for years and its worked fine without
a problem. I love it because none of the network latency issues that are
associated with later versions of Frame affect you -- because the network
is almost completely removed from the equation. It also makes working over
VPN a breeze, where i'd rather eat broken class then try to edit FM files
on a NFS through VPN.

If you want additional details, let me know.

Sincerely
Joesph Lorenzini
-- next part --
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FrameMaker 10 Crashes Regularly, is unstructured FrameMaker 11 more stable

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have been using FM 10 for about 2 years. It seems like FrameMaker will
randomly crash at least once a day on me. And I do mean crash --- get the
infamous fatal exception dialog box and then FrameMaker goes kaput. In
response to the inevitable debug questions:

-yes i have done a mif wash
-no this doesn't happen with a particular book or framemaker file. It
happens randomly no matter what book or file i am in and i have over 3,000
pages of documentation.
-yes, these files have existed since FM 9 -- not sure why that version
should make a difference
-there is no conditional text in any of the files. I do use text insets and
variables.
-no the crash doesn't seem to happen when i do a particular thing. The only
common thing that occurs is that i use hot keys a lot. That said, I use hot
keys a lot and most of the time the crash does not happen.
-no i am not on a network share. All files are local.
-Yes, FM 10 is fully patched.

In any event, debugging why this crash is happening would be non-trivial
and even if i did figure out why its happenings, there's no guarantee that
i'd able to find a fix. Adobe certainly isn't going to provide one.

Consequently, I am wondering if people have noticed whether FM 11 is
significantly more stable.Since I am in unstructured, there wasn't a
compelling reason for me to upgrade. However, i'll consider doing it, if it
will reduce or eliminate the frequency of crahses on framemaker.

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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FrameMaker 10 Crashes Regularly, is unstructured FrameMaker 11 more stable

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have been using FM 10 for about 2 years. It seems like FrameMaker will
randomly crash at least once a day on me. And I do mean crash --- get the
infamous fatal exception dialog box and then FrameMaker goes kaput. In
response to the inevitable debug questions:

-yes i have done a mif wash
-no this doesn't happen with a particular book or framemaker file. It
happens randomly no matter what book or file i am in and i have over 3,000
pages of documentation.
-yes, these files have existed since FM 9 -- not sure why that version
should make a difference
-there is no conditional text in any of the files. I do use text insets and
variables.
-no the crash doesn't seem to happen when i do a particular thing. The only
common thing that occurs is that i use hot keys a lot. That said, I use hot
keys a lot and most of the time the crash does not happen.
-no i am not on a network share. All files are local.
-Yes, FM 10 is fully patched.

In any event, debugging why this crash is happening would be non-trivial
and even if i did figure out why its happenings, there's no guarantee that
i'd able to find a fix. Adobe certainly isn't going to provide one.

Consequently, I am wondering if people have noticed whether FM 11 is
significantly more stable.Since I am in unstructured, there wasn't a
compelling reason for me to upgrade. However, i'll consider doing it, if it
will reduce or eliminate the frequency of crahses on framemaker.

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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ExtendScript Improvements in FrameMaker 11

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I am using TCS 3.5. This means I use unstructured FM 10 for PDF documents
and RoboHelp 9 for help systems. I looked at TCS 4.0 and so far I have
found the new version underwhelming. If I had structured FM or needed some
of the new SSL in Robohelp, it might be a different story. But for someone
who uses unstructured FM and webhelp, there's nothing really there there as
far as I can tell.

And no I couldn't care less about illustratror.

One thing that may make me seriously consider upgrading to FrameMaker 11 is
if Adobe fixed the  bugs and feature gaps in the ExtendScript
implementation in FM. However, I haven't been able to find out any
information about that.

Does anyone know?

Thanks,
Joe
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ExtendScript Improvements in FrameMaker 11

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I am using TCS 3.5. This means I use unstructured FM 10 for PDF documents
and RoboHelp 9 for help systems. I looked at TCS 4.0 and so far I have
found the new version underwhelming. If I had structured FM or needed some
of the new SSL in Robohelp, it might be a different story. But for someone
who uses unstructured FM and webhelp, there's nothing really there there as
far as I can tell.

And no I couldn't care less about illustratror.

One thing that may make me seriously consider upgrading to FrameMaker 11 is
if Adobe fixed the  bugs and feature gaps in the ExtendScript
implementation in FM. However, I haven't been able to find out any
information about that.

Does anyone know?

Thanks,
Joe
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Re: FrameMaker 10 does not start (licensing expired)

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I encountered this error message as well. Here are my findings:

*I have TCS 3.5. I am running FM 10 on a Win 7, 64 bit box.
*If I set the clock to a date prior to January 1st, 2013, then FM will open
successfully. Note that once FrameMaker is open, I actually switch my clock
back to the correct time and everything seems to work fine. I guess I'll
just never close FrameMaker until there's a fix or go through the process
of toggling my system clock backward and forward. Joy!!
*I tried solution 2 as described here and it did not work for me:
http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-licensing-product-expired-cs4.html.
I am not willing to try solution 3 unless I have some assurance it will
actually resolve the problem. A complete uninstall/reinstall is radical and
incredibly time consuming.

As others mentioned, the clock change is better then not having access to
FrameMaker but it is a completely unacceptable workaround even for the
short term. I really hope Adobe comes out with a fix for this ASAP.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Re: FrameMaker 10 does not start (licensing expired) and FM Performance

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have additional, highly disturbing information to pass on. It's possible
that this is a coincidence. However, I find it extraordinarily unlikely,
since I've never seen this performance hit until today. Today I am seeing
HORRENDOUS performance from FrameMaker, I have never seen FM go so slow to
do such simple tasks as updating or searching through a book.

Here are some of the things I am seeing:

*Updating a book that's only a few hundred pages cause FrameMaker to freeze
and become unresponsive for a minute or more. Its even worse if there are
actual errors found during the update process such as broken XREF.
*opening a framemaker file now has a noticeable lag of a few seconds.
*Search a book of a few hundred pages or doing a find/replace causes
framemaker to freeze and become unresponsive for a minute more.

Note that I've had this book for years and used it in framemaker 10 without
a problem until today. And no I have done nothing to the book or the files
today.

Is anyone else noticing a performance degradation in FM 10?

Here's some detailed information.

*Win 7, 64 bit
*8 GB of RAM
*solid state drive
*Intel Core i5-2540M CPU
*TCS 3.5, FM 10
*All framemaker files are stored locally on my computer

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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FrameMaker 10 does not start ("licensing expired")

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I encountered this error message as well. Here are my findings:

*I have TCS 3.5. I am running FM 10 on a Win 7, 64 bit box.
*If I set the clock to a date prior to January 1st, 2013, then FM will open
successfully. Note that once FrameMaker is open, I actually switch my clock
back to the correct time and everything seems to work fine. I guess I'll
just never close FrameMaker until there's a fix or go through the process
of toggling my system clock backward and forward. Joy!!
*I tried solution 2 as described here and it did not work for me:
http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/error-licensing-product-expired-cs4.html.
I am not willing to try solution 3 unless I have some assurance it will
actually resolve the problem. A complete uninstall/reinstall is radical and
incredibly time consuming.

As others mentioned, the clock change is better then not having access to
FrameMaker but it is a completely unacceptable workaround even for the
short term. I really hope Adobe comes out with a fix for this ASAP.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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FrameMaker 10 does not start ("licensing expired") and FM Performance

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have additional, highly disturbing information to pass on. It's possible
that this is a coincidence. However, I find it extraordinarily unlikely,
since I've never seen this performance hit until today. Today I am seeing
HORRENDOUS performance from FrameMaker, I have never seen FM go so slow to
do such simple tasks as updating or searching through a book.

Here are some of the things I am seeing:

*Updating a book that's only a few hundred pages cause FrameMaker to freeze
and become unresponsive for a minute or more. Its even worse if there are
actual errors found during the update process such as broken XREF.
*opening a framemaker file now has a noticeable lag of a few seconds.
*Search a book of a few hundred pages or doing a find/replace causes
framemaker to freeze and become unresponsive for a minute more.

Note that I've had this book for years and used it in framemaker 10 without
a problem until today. And no I have done nothing to the book or the files
today.

Is anyone else noticing a performance degradation in FM 10?

Here's some detailed information.

*Win 7, 64 bit
*8 GB of RAM
*solid state drive
*Intel Core i5-2540M CPU
*TCS 3.5, FM 10
*All framemaker files are stored locally on my computer

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Re: Framemaker scripting

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Harsh,

Unfortunately, the official end user documentation provided by Adobe is
incredibly poor, which makes learning ExtendScript significantly more
difficult than it needs to be.

Do you have any programming or scripting background? If you do not already
have this, I would say you need a basic familiarity with JavaScript and
start familiarizing yourself with FrameMaker's Document Object Model. Once
you have that, then I'd approach learning in terms of basic use cases.

You can also look at the following links:

http://forums.adobe.com/community/framemaker/extendscript?view=overview
http://blogs.adobe.com/tcs/2011/08/extendscript-estk/new-f-10-estk-doc.html


Joe
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Framemaker scripting

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Harsh,

Unfortunately, the official end user documentation provided by Adobe is
incredibly poor, which makes learning ExtendScript significantly more
difficult than it needs to be.

Do you have any programming or scripting background? If you do not already
have this, I would say you need a basic familiarity with JavaScript and
start familiarizing yourself with FrameMaker's Document Object Model. Once
you have that, then I'd approach learning in terms of basic use cases.

You can also look at the following links:

http://forums.adobe.com/community/framemaker/extendscript?view=overview
http://blogs.adobe.com/tcs/2011/08/extendscript-estk/new-f-10-estk-doc.html


Joe
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Translation Software for Handling FrameMaker Documents

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

A couple weeks ago I hit this forum on general questions about handling
localization. Thanks for the tips and guidance. Things at work have come
into more focus and here's the use case.

--we have a hired full time person that will be devoted to localization and
writing technical documentation in English and Chinese.
--we will not be using translation vendor to do the translation
--I want to purchase translation software that can create and maintain
translation memory. The plan is that the localization person would use this
software to automate the translation process and handle identifying new
content from existing content so they avoid having to re-translated the
same content over and over again.
--I do not want the software to be more than a couple thousand dollars.
--The software must be able to handle framemaker files as the source
material that will need to be translated.
--minimal learning curve to figure out how to use the software.

Am I dreaming? Does such software exist that won't break the bank? I know
there are translation solutions out there that costs tens of thousands of
dollars but that's definitely not within the budget. If there isn't, then
we'll have to use some type of manual process unfortunately.

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Re: Need ideas - Moving large files from one folder to another without breaking links (

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Salome,

An extendscript should be able to do what you are looking for. I would
recommend you either learn to write one yourself or just purchase an
Extendscript from someone. I'd recommend Rick Quatro if you want to buy an
extendscript like this. He's already created an Extendscript that mimics
the functionality found in Bruce Foster's archive plugin. What you are
looking for here is a similar type of functionality so I am sure he could
do this without too much trouble.

Joseph Lorenzini
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Need ideas - Moving large files from one folder to another without breaking links (

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Salome,

An extendscript should be able to do what you are looking for. I would
recommend you either learn to write one yourself or just purchase an
Extendscript from someone. I'd recommend Rick Quatro if you want to buy an
extendscript like this. He's already created an Extendscript that mimics
the functionality found in Bruce Foster's archive plugin. What you are
looking for here is a similar type of functionality so I am sure he could
do this without too much trouble.

Joseph Lorenzini
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Re: Localization Process with FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

 Hi Alison,

We plan to hire a professional translator. If you have recommendations for
that, please let me know. And thanks for the workflow. I may end up using
something like that.

One thing I noticed is that you are not using TT edits to identify what
things have changed and need to be translated. Instead, you are assuming
that the translator has appropriate software to flag that in the source FM
files.  That would be ideal obviously, if I didn't have to be personally
burden with tracking every single thing that has changed and requires
translation.

Thanks,
Joe

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 3:56 PM, Alison Craig
alison.cr...@ultrasonix.comwrote:

 Joseph:

 ** **

 **1.  **When you talk about the “translator” do you mean a
 professional at an LSP (Language Service Provider) or someone in-house who
 speaks/writes Chinese, so you use him/her? If the latter, I don’t recommend
 it. The ability to speak/write a language does not a translator make.
 Following that logic, anyone who speaks/writes English, can be an English
 technical writer – and we all know *that* isn’t true.

 **2.  **This is my process for an initial translation. Subsequent
 translations are almost identical but some things like creating Variable
 files are already done (note that my manuals are conditionalized so there
 are actually 5 manuals in one unstructured FM book files (22 separate FM
 files in this book):

 **a. **Complete manuals

 **b. **Log completed manual into VSS

 **c. **Create a completed manual English Master file folder(s) –
 different from your working folder(s)

 **d. **Accept all Track Changes

 **e. **Create all final PDFs and release English manuals 

 **f.  **Keep a copy, by product/condition, of all finished FM files
 that are used to create each PDF

 **g. **Create a new folder(s) for translation (I do this by language
 as we translate into 7 different languages at the moment – we have done up
 to 17)

 **h. **Copy a writable set of English Master files into the
 Simplified Chinese translation folder(s)

 **i.   **Create Variable files for translation files

 **j.   **Send files to LSP for quote (including request for creation
 of translation Glossary before 1st translation begins. It’s also best to
 have this proofed by an in-country expert before beginning the actual
 translation job.)

 **k. **Authorize translation based on quote

 **l.   **When the job is finished, always get a copy of the Glossary
 and new/updated Translation Memory (TM) so you can change LSPs at your
 discretion.

 **m.**When you do your 2nd and subsequent rounds of translation, the
 LSP will process the new FM files and the TM with professional tools (like
 TRADOS) to ensure that exact matches, fuzzy matches and repetitions are
 factored into the price and job cycle, ensuring that only new or edited
 text needs to be translated. 

 ** **

 This is a quick overview of my process. Some might find steps c and f-h a
 bit of overkill, but as I work with Medical Devices, we have an internal
 ISO release process. We are also constantly applying to new countries for
 Regulatory approval to sell our systems. I have learned the hard way that
 if I cannot recreate on-demand, an exact copy of a specific manual
 type/release – sometimes with new document numbers and languages codes –
 then things get extremely difficult for me. I also need to be able to
 recreate translated manuals with specific changes required by Regulatory
 bodies (the SFDA in the People’s Republic of China is particularly
 demanding)

 ** **

 Hope this helps,

 ** **

 Alison

 ** **

 * *

 *Alison Craig *

 Technical Documentation Lead

 604-279-8550 | fax 604-279-8559 | toll-free 1-866-437-9508
 *Ultrasonix Medical Corporation | 
 **www.ultrasonix.com*http://www.ultrasonix.com/

 [image: Description: Ultrasonix Medical Corp]

 ** **

 *From:* framers-boun...@lists.frameusers.com [mailto:
 framers-boun...@lists.frameusers.com] *On Behalf Of *Joseph Lorenzini
 *Sent:* Wednesday, September 26, 2012 11:35 AM
 *To:* FrameMaker Forum; tcs-us...@googlegroups.com

 *Subject:* Localization Process with FrameMaker 10

 ** **

 Hi all,


 I am using unstructured FrameMaker 10. I am documenting a product in
 English, which needs to be translated into Chinese every release. I was
 curious what process people use to do the localization. Here is the process
 I was thinking about using with the existing documentation.

 1. there would be two versions of each document. One for english and
 another Chinese. I thought about using the same Framemaker files and
 conditionalizing the text based on language but that seemed awfully messy.
 2.place all FM files in SVN so they are source control.
 3. for each release, turn on track changes for the English versions.
 4. once documentation for the release is complete, commit FM files to SVN.
 5. localization

Localization Process with FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I am using unstructured FrameMaker 10. I am documenting a product in
English, which needs to be translated into Chinese every release. I was
curious what process people use to do the localization. Here is the process
I was thinking about using with the existing documentation.

1. there would be two versions of each document. One for english and
another Chinese. I thought about using the same Framemaker files and
conditionalizing the text based on language but that seemed awfully messy.
2.place all FM files in SVN so they are source control.
3. for each release, turn on track changes for the English versions.
4. once documentation for the release is complete, commit FM files to SVN.
5. localization person retrieves files from SVN.
6. Using the FM TT toolbar, the translator searches for any changes since
the last release.
7. For the changes the translator finds, the person goes to the chinese
version and makes the appropriate updates.
8. I am not sure how to handle changes to screenshots though, so any
suggestions on that would be helpful.

So what does everyone think about the above process? Is there a better way
to do this? I can't say that I am crazy about using track changes
considering how crude and unstable they are (hello framemaker crashes) but
they are better than nothing.

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Localization Process with FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I am using unstructured FrameMaker 10. I am documenting a product in
English, which needs to be translated into Chinese every release. I was
curious what process people use to do the localization. Here is the process
I was thinking about using with the existing documentation.

1. there would be two versions of each document. One for english and
another Chinese. I thought about using the same Framemaker files and
conditionalizing the text based on language but that seemed awfully messy.
2.place all FM files in SVN so they are source control.
3. for each release, turn on track changes for the English versions.
4. once documentation for the release is complete, commit FM files to SVN.
5. localization person retrieves files from SVN.
6. Using the FM TT toolbar, the translator searches for any changes since
the last release.
7. For the changes the translator finds, the person goes to the chinese
version and makes the appropriate updates.
8. I am not sure how to handle changes to screenshots though, so any
suggestions on that would be helpful.

So what does everyone think about the above process? Is there a better way
to do this? I can't say that I am crazy about using track changes
considering how crude and unstable they are (hello framemaker crashes) but
they are better than nothing.

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Localization Process with FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

 Hi Alison,

We plan to hire a professional translator. If you have recommendations for
that, please let me know. And thanks for the workflow. I may end up using
something like that.

One thing I noticed is that you are not using TT edits to identify what
things have changed and need to be translated. Instead, you are assuming
that the translator has appropriate software to flag that in the source FM
files.  That would be ideal obviously, if I didn't have to be personally
burden with tracking every single thing that has changed and requires
translation.

Thanks,
Joe

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 3:56 PM, Alison Craig
wrote:

> Joseph:
>
> ** **
>
> **1.  **When you talk about the ?translator? do you mean a
> professional at an LSP (Language Service Provider) or someone in-house who
> speaks/writes Chinese, so you use him/her? If the latter, I don?t recommend
> it. The ability to speak/write a language does not a translator make.
> Following that logic, anyone who speaks/writes English, can be an English
> technical writer ? and we all know *that* isn?t true.
>
> **2.  **This is my process for an initial translation. Subsequent
> translations are almost identical but some things like creating Variable
> files are already done (note that my manuals are conditionalized so there
> are actually 5 manuals in one unstructured FM book files (22 separate FM
> files in this book):
>
> **a. **Complete manuals
>
> **b. **Log completed manual into VSS
>
> **c. **Create a completed manual English Master file folder(s) ?
> different from your working folder(s)
>
> **d. **Accept all Track Changes
>
> **e. **Create all final PDFs and release English manuals 
>
> **f.  **Keep a copy, by product/condition, of all finished FM files
> that are used to create each PDF
>
> **g. **Create a new folder(s) for translation (I do this by language
> as we translate into 7 different languages at the moment ? we have done up
> to 17)
>
> **h. **Copy a writable set of English Master files into the
> Simplified Chinese translation folder(s)
>
> **i.   **Create Variable files for translation files
>
> **j.   **Send files to LSP for quote (including request for creation
> of translation Glossary before 1st translation begins. It?s also best to
> have this proofed by an in-country expert before beginning the actual
> translation job.)
>
> **k. **Authorize translation based on quote
>
> **l.   **When the job is finished, always get a copy of the Glossary
> and new/updated Translation Memory (TM) so you can change LSPs at your
> discretion.
>
> **m.**When you do your 2nd and subsequent rounds of translation, the
> LSP will process the new FM files and the TM with professional tools (like
> TRADOS) to ensure that exact matches, fuzzy matches and repetitions are
> factored into the price and job cycle, ensuring that only new or edited
> text needs to be translated. 
>
> ** **
>
> This is a quick overview of my process. Some might find steps c and f-h a
> bit of overkill, but as I work with Medical Devices, we have an internal
> ISO release process. We are also constantly applying to new countries for
> Regulatory approval to sell our systems. I have learned the hard way that
> if I cannot recreate on-demand, an exact copy of a specific manual
> type/release ? sometimes with new document numbers and languages codes ?
> then things get extremely difficult for me. I also need to be able to
> recreate translated manuals with specific changes required by Regulatory
> bodies (the SFDA in the People?s Republic of China is particularly
> demanding)
>
> ** **
>
> Hope this helps,
>
> ** **
>
> Alison
>
> ** **
>
> * *
>
> *Alison Craig *
>
> Technical Documentation Lead
>
> 604-279-8550 | fax 604-279-8559 | toll-free 1-866-437-9508
> *Ultrasonix Medical Corporation | 
> **www.ultrasonix.com*<http://www.ultrasonix.com/>
>
> [image: Description: Ultrasonix Medical Corp]
>
> ** **
>
> *From:* framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:
> framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] *On Behalf Of *Joseph Lorenzini
> *Sent:* Wednesday, September 26, 2012 11:35 AM
> *To:* FrameMaker Forum; TCS-Users at googlegroups.com
>
> *Subject:* Localization Process with FrameMaker 10
>
> ** **
>
> Hi all,
>
>
> I am using unstructured FrameMaker 10. I am documenting a product in
> English, which needs to be translated into Chinese every release. I was
> curious what process people use to do the localization. Here is the process
> I was thinking about using with the existing documentation.
>

Re: Document Revision Control

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Chris,

This issue you raised about binary files and SVN used to be true but is
somewhat inaccurate now. I stayed away from SVN for a really long time
because of this very issue. I thought it was ridiculous that every time I
would make a commit, SVN would commit an entirely new version of the file.

However, a couple years ago, the IT admin, who manages the SVN repos for my
company, explained that later versions of SVN can in fact commit just the
differences between two versions of the same binary file. I was able to
confirm this with some testing of my own. The size of my doc repo would be
exponentially larger if every commit was the entire FrameMaker file instead
of the difference.

Now with that said, the following is still true:
1. committing large binary files is considered bad form and frowned upon
from an engineering point of view. That's because SVN doesn't manage
binaries nearly as well as it can handle text files.
2. The key thing that SVN still cannot do is actually perform SVN blame or
diff two versions of the file for you. It can only commit the difference,
it can't identify and compare the difference between version 1 and version
2 for you.

From a software development point of view, I can see why they'd hate on
binaries. However, in terms of technical writing, I see the above concerns
as addressable since there's a diffing capability built right into
framemaker. All I have to do is check out two versions of a file and then
have framemaker do a diff on them. Its not perfect but i think its good
enough.

Furthermore, to avoid issues with engineering, I have my own separate
repository that's dedicated solely to documentation. Engineering doesn't
know or care about it.

Sincerely
Joseph Lorenzini

Original Message:

Just a word about MIF in source control.? It's true that storing binary
files (.fm) in source control is somewhat abusive, because the system has
to store a complete copy of the file for each revision.? In the old days
dev would never let you do that because storage actually cost something.?
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Document Revision Control

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Chris,

This issue you raised about binary files and SVN used to be true but is
somewhat inaccurate now. I stayed away from SVN for a really long time
because of this very issue. I thought it was ridiculous that every time I
would make a commit, SVN would commit an entirely new version of the file.

However, a couple years ago, the IT admin, who manages the SVN repos for my
company, explained that later versions of SVN can in fact commit just the
differences between two versions of the same binary file. I was able to
confirm this with some testing of my own. The size of my doc repo would be
exponentially larger if every commit was the entire FrameMaker file instead
of the difference.

Now with that said, the following is still true:
1. committing large binary files is considered bad form and frowned upon
from an engineering point of view. That's because SVN doesn't manage
binaries nearly as well as it can handle text files.
2. The key thing that SVN still cannot do is actually perform SVN blame or
diff two versions of the file for you. It can only commit the difference,
it can't identify and compare the difference between version 1 and version
2 for you.

>From a software development point of view, I can see why they'd hate on
binaries. However, in terms of technical writing, I see the above concerns
as addressable since there's a diffing capability built right into
framemaker. All I have to do is check out two versions of a file and then
have framemaker do a diff on them. Its not perfect but i think its good
enough.

Furthermore, to avoid issues with engineering, I have my own separate
repository that's dedicated solely to documentation. Engineering doesn't
know or care about it.

Sincerely
Joseph Lorenzini

Original Message:

"Just a word about MIF in source control.? It's true that storing binary
files (.fm) in source control is somewhat abusive, because the system has
to store a complete copy of the file for each revision.? In the old days
dev would never let you do that because storage actually cost something.?"
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Re: Document revision control

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Amy,

I strongly recommend subversion considering that you are such a small team,
especially compared to the other options. In the end, it does ultimately
come down to your use case, so it in some sense depends.

--Perforce: have not used this personally but i believe its a high learning
curve and will cost moneyhow much i don't know.

--Sharepoint: I would not touch this with a 10 foot pole. It seems like I
see a post at least once a week from some writer complaining about how the
integration is not working as expected. They usually are complaining about
how check in and check outs are not functioning, which is a really bad
sign. Plus, you have to license and maintain a sharepoint site. And then
you as a tech writer have to be burdened with sharepoint in order to handle
some of the  most basic tasks.

--Documentum: Okay here's the thing. It costs like 200 thousand dollars.  I
think that's an insane amount of money to charge for a content management
system that technical writers need. I could only see that being a
consideration if you had a team of like 50 writers or something massive.


---Subversion: Its basically free. You just have the cost of setting up a
subversion server, which is not that big of a deal. Typically, someone in
your IT department will it do for you.  Plus, there are nice free SVN
clients for doing check ins, check outs, looking at the repository etc.

And here's the awesome thing about this: it just works. There's nothing
complicated about it. I have been using SVN for years now and I have had
almost no problems with it. There are some pros and cons associated with
SVN, which I can go into detail if you want. But i give a big thumbs up to
SVN if I were if you consider the ROI, cost of business, and the fact that
you are talking about only 3 writers.

Joe
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Re: Batch saving files in FrameMaker 11

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Salome,

You can easily do this with an ExtendScript. I am a novice scripter and I
was able to create a script that batch saved files to MIF in FM 10 with
about half an hour of work.

If you don't know how to do simple scripts and you don't have time to
learn, I am sure you could purchase the services of someone to create a
script for you. I doubt it would be more than 100 dollars.

Joe
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Document revision control

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Amy,

I strongly recommend subversion considering that you are such a small team,
especially compared to the other options. In the end, it does ultimately
come down to your use case, so it in some sense depends.

--Perforce: have not used this personally but i believe its a high learning
curve and will cost moneyhow much i don't know.

--Sharepoint: I would not touch this with a 10 foot pole. It seems like I
see a post at least once a week from some writer complaining about how the
integration is not working as expected. They usually are complaining about
how check in and check outs are not functioning, which is a really bad
sign. Plus, you have to license and maintain a sharepoint site. And then
you as a tech writer have to be burdened with sharepoint in order to handle
some of the  most basic tasks.

--Documentum: Okay here's the thing. It costs like 200 thousand dollars.  I
think that's an insane amount of money to charge for a content management
system that technical writers need. I could only see that being a
consideration if you had a team of like 50 writers or something massive.


---Subversion: Its basically free. You just have the cost of setting up a
subversion server, which is not that big of a deal. Typically, someone in
your IT department will it do for you.  Plus, there are nice free SVN
clients for doing check ins, check outs, looking at the repository etc.

And here's the awesome thing about this: it just works. There's nothing
complicated about it. I have been using SVN for years now and I have had
almost no problems with it. There are some pros and cons associated with
SVN, which I can go into detail if you want. But i give a big thumbs up to
SVN if I were if you consider the ROI, cost of business, and the fact that
you are talking about only 3 writers.

Joe
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Batch saving files in FrameMaker 11

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Salome,

You can easily do this with an ExtendScript. I am a novice scripter and I
was able to create a script that batch saved files to MIF in FM 10 with
about half an hour of work.

If you don't know how to do simple scripts and you don't have time to
learn, I am sure you could purchase the services of someone to create a
script for you. I doubt it would be more than 100 dollars.

Joe
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Re: Track Edits in FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Rick,

I'll just split this up into a pro and con list. :) Bottom line up front:
its a decent solution if you are using it for a small team with three
writers or less but it does not scale well at all in terms of content OR
the number of users making edits. You'd be better off just using the
commenting functionality in acrobat reader if there's a lot of edits/lots
of editors etc.

Pros:
-allows you to track new text added in and deleted text. Deleted text
appears in red and new text appears in green. Note these are in fact
hidden conditional text.
-allows you track which user has made a change so you can search for
particular edits by user. You can also filter the edits so you only see
edits by a particular user or users.
-TT edits can be controlled on the document and book level so you can flip
on TT edits for a particular book or for just a single document.
-enable or disable TT edits across an entire book via a single click.
-accept or reject all  TT edits across an entire book via a single click

Cons:
-no commenting functionality. If you want to make a comment, it will appear
as new text.
-no way to visually distinguish between editors. For example, if John Doe
inserts text and George Smith also inserts text they both appear as green
text. You just know its newly inserted text, you have to pay careful
attention via other subtle visual cues that its separate editors.
-can be really had to use if you use conditional text especially if the
text is the same color as the hidden conditional text of the insertion and
deletion edits. Note also that if you apply conditional text to TT edit
text that this can corrupt the book and cause the book to crash each time
you do an update and save.
-each time you turn TT edits it generates the stupid back up files for each
file in the book which you'll have to clean up each time.
-if you have a collaborative editing process where many people need to
review text, make edits, and comments, then the process becomes nightmarish
because its really hard to tell how is commenting on what or who is
responding to what comment.
-overall stability of framemaker seems to go down when the TT edits is
turned on. It might be better in framemaker 11.

Joe
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Track Edits in FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Rick,

I'll just split this up into a pro and con list. :) Bottom line up front:
its a decent solution if you are using it for a small team with three
writers or less but it does not scale well at all in terms of content OR
the number of users making edits. You'd be better off just using the
commenting functionality in acrobat reader if there's a lot of edits/lots
of editors etc.

Pros:
-allows you to track new text added in and deleted text. Deleted text
appears in red and new text appears in green. Note these are in fact
"hidden" conditional text.
-allows you track which user has made a change so you can search for
particular edits by user. You can also filter the edits so you only see
edits by a particular user or users.
-TT edits can be controlled on the document and book level so you can flip
on TT edits for a particular book or for just a single document.
-enable or disable TT edits across an entire book via a single click.
-accept or reject all  TT edits across an entire book via a single click

Cons:
-no commenting functionality. If you want to make a comment, it will appear
as new text.
-no way to visually distinguish between editors. For example, if John Doe
inserts text and George Smith also inserts text they both appear as green
text. You just know its newly inserted text, you have to pay careful
attention via other subtle visual cues that its separate editors.
-can be really had to use if you use conditional text especially if the
text is the same color as the hidden conditional text of the insertion and
deletion edits. Note also that if you apply conditional text to TT edit
text that this can corrupt the book and cause the book to crash each time
you do an update and save.
-each time you turn TT edits it generates the stupid back up files for each
file in the book which you'll have to clean up each time.
-if you have a collaborative editing process where many people need to
review text, make edits, and comments, then the process becomes nightmarish
because its really hard to tell how is commenting on what or who is
responding to what comment.
-overall stability of framemaker seems to go down when the TT edits is
turned on. It might be better in framemaker 11.

Joe
-- next part --
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Re: FrameMaker 10 Crashes When Saving a Book with Conditional Text and TT Edits

[Joseph Lorenzini]

 Hi Roman,


Yes both of us have fully patched  versions of FrameMaker 10.

Thanks
Joe
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OT: Job Posting

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I am looking to fill a contract position for a technical writer. The job
will be located in Oak Brook, IL. If anyone is interested, please contact
me at jaloren AT gmail.com for additional details.

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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OT: Job Posting

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I am looking to fill a contract position for a technical writer. The job
will be located in Oak Brook, IL. If anyone is interested, please contact
me at jaloren AT gmail.com for additional details.

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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FrameMaker 10 Crashes When Saving a Book with Conditional Text and TT Edits

[Joseph Lorenzini]

>
> Hi Roman,
>

Yes both of us have fully patched  versions of FrameMaker 10.

Thanks
Joe
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FrameMaker 10 Crashes When Saving a Book with Conditional Text and TT Edits

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi All,

Until quite recently, I was the sole technical writer at my company. In the
last few months, a new writer was hired on. To review the edits he made to
the documentation, he turned on track text edits. In addition, he
occasionally applied conditional text to new text that he wrote. This meant
that the green TT conditional text is applied indicating new text AND
conditional text is applied to that text. Before he did this, the
FrameMaker book would update and save without a problem. I have had this
book for years and it has rarely ever experienced a crash or corruption.
After he did this, each time I update the book, FrameMaker would crash. The
moment I removed the specific sections of text that have TT edits and
conditional text applied, the crashes no longer occurred.

Has anyone seen anything like this or know how to work around this?  Its
really frustrating and a shame because I think this means that conditional
text and TT edits are mutually exclusive and if you combine them you risk
crashing FrameMaker.

Here's some relevant information for debugging the issue:

--the write and I are on machines with almost identical specs: Win 7
Enterprise 64 bit, Solid State drives, 4 GB of RAM, Intel Core i5 CPU
--the writer and i are on TCS 3.5.
--we are both using Framemaker 10
--we do not work off a network share. Instead we use SVN.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Joe
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FrameMaker 10 Crashes When Saving a Book with Conditional Text and TT Edits

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi All,

Until quite recently, I was the sole technical writer at my company. In the
last few months, a new writer was hired on. To review the edits he made to
the documentation, he turned on track text edits. In addition, he
occasionally applied conditional text to new text that he wrote. This meant
that the green TT conditional text is applied indicating new text AND
conditional text is applied to that text. Before he did this, the
FrameMaker book would update and save without a problem. I have had this
book for years and it has rarely ever experienced a crash or corruption.
After he did this, each time I update the book, FrameMaker would crash. The
moment I removed the specific sections of text that have TT edits and
conditional text applied, the crashes no longer occurred.

Has anyone seen anything like this or know how to work around this?  Its
really frustrating and a shame because I think this means that conditional
text and TT edits are mutually exclusive and if you combine them you risk
crashing FrameMaker.

Here's some relevant information for debugging the issue:

--the write and I are on machines with almost identical specs: Win 7
Enterprise 64 bit, Solid State drives, 4 GB of RAM, Intel Core i5 CPU
--the writer and i are on TCS 3.5.
--we are both using Framemaker 10
--we do not work off a network share. Instead we use SVN.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Joe
-- next part --
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Re: Using Extendscript to Set PDF Options in a FrameMaker Book

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

With some extremely helpful pointers from Rick Quatro, I believe I have
more or less figured out how this has to be done. The script would need to
do this:

1. in the FM book, save each file to MIF.
2. add/modify MIF statements in the file.
3. save the file back to the FrameMaker format.

For example, I have it figured out for the default PDF zoom level at least.
I had to review the mif reference guide (could only find it for FM 8, any
later guide out there?) and map that to the mif statements for FM 10
documents. They are similar to FM 8, but also slightly different. There's
the following MIF document statements:

 DPDFFit None
 DPDFZoom  125.0%

In each document in the book, I need to set the above MIF statements. Then,
the FM book will print the document to PDF, where the default zoom level is
125%.

A big thanks to Rick on this one.

Joe
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Using Extendscript to Set PDF Options in a FrameMaker Book

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

With some extremely helpful pointers from Rick Quatro, I believe I have
more or less figured out how this has to be done. The script would need to
do this:

1. in the FM book, save each file to MIF.
2. add/modify MIF statements in the file.
3. save the file back to the FrameMaker format.

For example, I have it figured out for the default PDF zoom level at least.
I had to review the mif reference guide (could only find it for FM 8, any
later guide out there?) and map that to the mif statements for FM 10
documents. They are similar to FM 8, but also slightly different. There's
the following MIF document statements:

 
 

In each document in the book, I need to set the above MIF statements. Then,
the FM book will print the document to PDF, where the default zoom level is
125%.

A big thanks to Rick on this one.

Joe
-- next part --
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Using Extendscript to Set PDF Options in a FrameMaker Book

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

Has anyone gotten Extendscript to work on setting ANY of the PDF options
for a FrameMaker book, such as the PDF's default zoom or what level
bookmarks are expanded at? I am trying to set this at the book level and
print the book to a PS file. However, when distiller runs, it does not
retain any of the settings my script set. If you have any guidance on this,
please let me know.

See here for additional details: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1030306

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Using Extendscript to Set PDF Options in a FrameMaker Book

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

Has anyone gotten Extendscript to work on setting ANY of the PDF options
for a FrameMaker book, such as the PDF's default zoom or what level
bookmarks are expanded at? I am trying to set this at the book level and
print the book to a PS file. However, when distiller runs, it does not
retain any of the settings my script set. If you have any guidance on this,
please let me know.

See here for additional details: http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1030306

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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What's your top feature request for FrameMaker 11?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I replied to the adobe forum post soliciting feedback for feature requests.
I got some push back on this. So I am curious what other people think of
the following idea. Am I all wet or is this just far less important than I
think?

FrameMaker should be converted into a true XML authoring environment. There
should be no structured or unstructured frameamerk. There should just be
FrameMaker, which has XML files. When I upgrade to the latest version of
FrameMaker, all my binary files should be converted into XML documents. You
should publish a XSD that defines the XML doc structure and leverage the
existing XSLT engine, so that out of the box any FrameMaker book can be
converted into any publishing format the user would care to. And also allow
the user to design their own XSLTS to convert into some other format that
people haven't even thought of yet. That way I can truly single source all
my content in FrameMaker instead of having to use the buggy Framemaker to
Robohelp integration.

In addition, provide a GUI that allows me to design a template and
structure (similar to structured framemaker ) that allows me to perform
schema validation of the structure and enforces controls on what the
template may contain. Basically, this would just be a port of EDD more or
less.

the point is that FrameMaker fundamentally needs to be an XML authoring
environment instead of XML authoring kinda sorta supported if you are
willing to bite the bullet and convert to structured FM. Increasingly few
people can do so because the cost is so high, its hard to make a business
case. I know I can't and I have looked into this extensively.  Adobe has
tried to pretend that converting over to structured authoring is easy but
in order to do this they have to have SEVEN webinars or a 7 hour training
session just to give the basics!! While a huge change, I believe this one
architectural change will provide the framework to address many of the
other problems and competitive disadvantages framemaker has with other
products out there.

These other problems are: version control, data structures, and publication
formats.

I currently place framemaker files in SVN and that works decently but
because they are binary files I can't ever do diffs and FrameMaker's built
in diffing capabilities is incredibly clunky and doesn't scale well at all.
Furthermore, hello binary bloat in the source control repository. It would
be amazing if instead I was committing XML files.

In my opinion, FrameMaker's core competitive disadvantage is that the Book
to PDF paradigm is dead. By that I do not mean PDFs and user guides are
dead, I mean that instead of having only one format to publish to (PDF) and
data structure (user guide or book) there are many other publication
formats and data formats (e.g knowledge base) that are of co-equal
importance.

As long as one stays strictly within book-to-PDF only paradigm, FrameMaker
is awesome. The moment you go outside of that FrameMaker becomes very, very
clunky, where you need to either use special tools (like Mif2Go) or use
RoboHelp as a publishing engine (which has its own pain let me tell you).
 One of the things i love most about FrameMaker is its powerful single
sourcing capabilities. I want to use FrameMaker to be a single repository
of all my content and I want to be able to publish that content in whatever
format i choose. I believe one way to do this is to make FrameMaker a true
XML authoring environment and use a powerful XSLT engine to convert the
content into whatever format I want. The benefit of this particular
approach is that its not just a solution but its an extensible framework.
In theory, if the next hot format and data structure comes out tomorrow, I
should be able to contract out,  design myself, or buy an XSLT that will
generate the output that I desire.

Put another away if I didn't need acrobat professional to handle PDFs, I
would have switched to a tool like Flare a long time ago. If there comes a
day when my audience no longer needs or cares about PDFs, that's the day I
get rid of FrameMaker. That day isn't now but that could quite easily
happen in the next 5 to 10 years. I really like FrameMaker but it has
failed to stay current with the needs of technical communication industry
and its only stayed alive because of a currently large dedicated user base
and because PDFs are still one of the primary modes of communication.  I
predict that when the later goes away so will the former unless Adobe can
present a value proposition that no longer relies on vendor lock in and PDF
usage.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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What's your top feature request for FrameMaker 11?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I replied to the adobe forum post soliciting feedback for feature requests.
I got some push back on this. So I am curious what other people think of
the following idea. Am I all wet or is this just far less important than I
think?

FrameMaker should be converted into a true XML authoring environment. There
should be no structured or unstructured frameamerk. There should just be
FrameMaker, which has XML files. When I upgrade to the latest version of
FrameMaker, all my binary files should be converted into XML documents. You
should publish a XSD that defines the XML doc structure and leverage the
existing XSLT engine, so that out of the box any FrameMaker book can be
converted into any publishing format the user would care to. And also allow
the user to design their own XSLTS to convert into some other format that
people haven't even thought of yet. That way I can truly single source all
my content in FrameMaker instead of having to use the buggy Framemaker to
Robohelp integration.

In addition, provide a GUI that allows me to design a template and
structure (similar to structured framemaker ) that allows me to perform
schema validation of the structure and enforces controls on what the
template may contain. Basically, this would just be a port of EDD more or
less.

the point is that FrameMaker fundamentally needs to be an XML authoring
environment instead of XML authoring kinda sorta supported if you are
willing to bite the bullet and convert to structured FM. Increasingly few
people can do so because the cost is so high, its hard to make a business
case. I know I can't and I have looked into this extensively.  Adobe has
tried to pretend that converting over to structured authoring is easy but
in order to do this they have to have SEVEN webinars or a 7 hour training
session just to give the basics!! While a huge change, I believe this one
architectural change will provide the framework to address many of the
other problems and competitive disadvantages framemaker has with other
products out there.

These other problems are: version control, data structures, and publication
formats.

I currently place framemaker files in SVN and that works decently but
because they are binary files I can't ever do diffs and FrameMaker's built
in diffing capabilities is incredibly clunky and doesn't scale well at all.
Furthermore, hello binary bloat in the source control repository. It would
be amazing if instead I was committing XML files.

In my opinion, FrameMaker's core competitive disadvantage is that the Book
to PDF paradigm is dead. By that I do not mean PDFs and user guides are
dead, I mean that instead of having only one format to publish to (PDF) and
data structure (user guide or book) there are many other publication
formats and data formats (e.g knowledge base) that are of co-equal
importance.

As long as one stays strictly within book-to-PDF only paradigm, FrameMaker
is awesome. The moment you go outside of that FrameMaker becomes very, very
clunky, where you need to either use special tools (like Mif2Go) or use
RoboHelp as a publishing engine (which has its own pain let me tell you).
 One of the things i love most about FrameMaker is its powerful single
sourcing capabilities. I want to use FrameMaker to be a single repository
of all my content and I want to be able to publish that content in whatever
format i choose. I believe one way to do this is to make FrameMaker a true
XML authoring environment and use a powerful XSLT engine to convert the
content into whatever format I want. The benefit of this particular
approach is that its not just a solution but its an extensible framework.
In theory, if the next hot format and data structure comes out tomorrow, I
should be able to contract out,  design myself, or buy an XSLT that will
generate the output that I desire.

Put another away if I didn't need acrobat professional to handle PDFs, I
would have switched to a tool like Flare a long time ago. If there comes a
day when my audience no longer needs or cares about PDFs, that's the day I
get rid of FrameMaker. That day isn't now but that could quite easily
happen in the next 5 to 10 years. I really like FrameMaker but it has
failed to stay current with the needs of technical communication industry
and its only stayed alive because of a currently large dedicated user base
and because PDFs are still one of the primary modes of communication.  I
predict that when the later goes away so will the former unless Adobe can
present a value proposition that no longer relies on vendor lock in and PDF
usage.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Throw Sharepoint to the Curb and Use SVN Instead

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I didn't pay a lot of attention to the FM 10 CMS integration with
sharepoint.  However, based on what I have been reading, it sounds like
this is really unstable and unreliable. I am urging anyone who is going
down the sharepoint route, to use SVN instead. I have been using SVN  for
several years, starting with FrameMaker 9. I have been using FrameMaker 10
with SVN for over a year. This integration just works. There is no muss, no
fuss. If you have a SVN repository set up, then you can just put the
FrameMaker files and you are off to the races. And SVN is free!!

The only downside is that because FrameMaker files are binary, there is no
way to do SVN diffs between two different versions of the same file.

Joe
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Throw Sharepoint to the Curb and Use SVN Instead

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I didn't pay a lot of attention to the FM 10 CMS integration with
sharepoint.  However, based on what I have been reading, it sounds like
this is really unstable and unreliable. I am urging anyone who is going
down the sharepoint route, to use SVN instead. I have been using SVN  for
several years, starting with FrameMaker 9. I have been using FrameMaker 10
with SVN for over a year. This integration just works. There is no muss, no
fuss. If you have a SVN repository set up, then you can just put the
FrameMaker files and you are off to the races. And SVN is free!!

The only downside is that because FrameMaker files are binary, there is no
way to do SVN diffs between two different versions of the same file.

Joe
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Re:archive for Frame10?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Ken,

I would not use the archive script that one of the Adobe engineers
designed. It was horrendously buggy. The good news is that Rick Quatro has
designed an ExtendScript that will do the archive operation correctly in
FrameMaker 10. I believe you can purchase the script for approximately 80
dollars.

You can contact him at r...@frameexpert.com.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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archive for Frame10?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Ken,

I would not use the archive script that one of the Adobe engineers
designed. It was horrendously buggy. The good news is that Rick Quatro has
designed an ExtendScript that will do the archive operation correctly in
FrameMaker 10. I believe you can purchase the script for approximately 80
dollars.

You can contact him at rick at frameexpert.com.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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OT: Job Posting

[Joseph Lorenzini]

All:

I am looking to fill a technical writer position in Oak Brook, IL. The
writer would be authoring complex IT documentation in unstructured
FrameMaker 10 and using RoboHelp 9 to generate help systems. Looking for
3-5 years of experience. Writer must work on site. It is a long term
contract position.

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, please contact me at
jaloren AT gmail.com. I can forward you a detailed job posting.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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OT: Job Posting

[Joseph Lorenzini]

All:

I am looking to fill a technical writer position in Oak Brook, IL. The
writer would be authoring complex IT documentation in unstructured
FrameMaker 10 and using RoboHelp 9 to generate help systems. Looking for
3-5 years of experience. Writer must work on site. It is a long term
contract position.

If this sounds like something you'd be interested in, please contact me at
jaloren AT gmail.com. I can forward you a detailed job posting.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Re: Unstructured to structured FM?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Laura,

I'd recommend talking to Sarah O'Keefe at Scriptorium Publishing. I'd also
take a look at these:

http://www.scriptorium.com/structure.pdf
http://www.scriptorium.com/category/resources/xmldita/xml-xmldita/

The key question I'd have is ROI on doing this, since these types of
conversions can easily cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours.

 It  doesn't sound like your manager has done a cost benefit analysis of
what it would mean to convert nor has he or she analyzed the business case.
If all your manager wants to do is make it easier to share our doc set
with people in the company, then instead of saying XML authoring to the
rescue I suggest  that you think about *that* and what tools could best
achieve that (the tool could be XML authoring or something else).

From the preliminary investigations I have done to see if XML authoring
would be a good idea for my company, I discovered that unless you are doing
significant localizations, have a massive documentation set, and/or have a
large technical writing department, making a business case for structured
authoring will probably be hard.

Off the top of my head, I'd want to know this about your share content
with others situation:

   - who in the company do you need to share the content with?
   - If its other technical writers, who need to edit the content, then why
   not put the FrameMaker documentation in a version control repository and
   have those writers user unstructured framemaker to edit the content?
   - If its people, such as sales or developers, who need to consume the
   content and provide feedback, then why not just provide PDFs that are
   enabled for commenting in acrobat reader and then distribute them via NFS?
   - If you need to *collaborate *with departments across the company, then
   why not look at using a wiki?

Note that all of the suggestions I have provided is significantly cheaper
than converting to structured XML authoring and will NOT disrupt your
current workflow.

Any other questions, just let me know.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Re: Unstructured to structured FM?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

One other thought is to convert FrameMaker books into a web help system and
deploy that to a web server that anyone in your company could access.
That's a fairly simple exercise to do if you have the technical
communication suite and I can provide a detailed explanation on how to do
that if you are interested.

Joe

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Joseph Lorenzini jalo...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hi Laura,

 I'd recommend talking to Sarah O'Keefe at Scriptorium Publishing. I'd also
 take a look at these:

 http://www.scriptorium.com/structure.pdf
 http://www.scriptorium.com/category/resources/xmldita/xml-xmldita/

 The key question I'd have is ROI on doing this, since these types of
 conversions can easily cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours.

  It  doesn't sound like your manager has done a cost benefit analysis of
 what it would mean to convert nor has he or she analyzed the business case.
 If all your manager wants to do is make it easier to share our doc set
 with people in the company, then instead of saying XML authoring to the
 rescue I suggest  that you think about *that* and what tools could best
 achieve that (the tool could be XML authoring or something else).

 From the preliminary investigations I have done to see if XML authoring
 would be a good idea for my company, I discovered that unless you are doing
 significant localizations, have a massive documentation set, and/or have a
 large technical writing department, making a business case for structured
 authoring will probably be hard.

 Off the top of my head, I'd want to know this about your share content
 with others situation:

- who in the company do you need to share the content with?
- If its other technical writers, who need to edit the content, then
why not put the FrameMaker documentation in a version control repository
and have those writers user unstructured framemaker to edit the content?
- If its people, such as sales or developers, who need to consume the
content and provide feedback, then why not just provide PDFs that are
enabled for commenting in acrobat reader and then distribute them via NFS?
- If you need to *collaborate *with departments across the company,
then why not look at using a wiki?

 Note that all of the suggestions I have provided is significantly cheaper
 than converting to structured XML authoring and will NOT disrupt your
 current workflow.

 Any other questions, just let me know.

 Sincerely,
 Joseph Lorenzini



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Unstructured to structured FM?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Laura,

I'd recommend talking to Sarah O'Keefe at Scriptorium Publishing. I'd also
take a look at these:

http://www.scriptorium.com/structure.pdf
http://www.scriptorium.com/category/resources/xmldita/xml-xmldita/

The key question I'd have is ROI on doing this, since these types of
conversions can easily cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours.

 It  doesn't sound like your manager has done a cost benefit analysis of
what it would mean to convert nor has he or she analyzed the business case.
If all your manager wants to do is "make it easier to share our doc set
with people in the company", then instead of saying "XML authoring to the
rescue" I suggest  that you think about *that* and what tools could best
achieve that (the tool could be XML authoring or something else).

>From the preliminary investigations I have done to see if XML authoring
would be a good idea for my company, I discovered that unless you are doing
significant localizations, have a massive documentation set, and/or have a
large technical writing department, making a business case for structured
authoring will probably be hard.

Off the top of my head, I'd want to know this about your "share content
with others" situation:

   - who in the company do you need to share the content with?
   - If its other technical writers, who need to edit the content, then why
   not put the FrameMaker documentation in a version control repository and
   have those writers user unstructured framemaker to edit the content?
   - If its people, such as sales or developers, who need to consume the
   content and provide feedback, then why not just provide PDFs that are
   enabled for commenting in acrobat reader and then distribute them via NFS?
   - If you need to *collaborate *with departments across the company, then
   why not look at using a wiki?

Note that all of the suggestions I have provided is significantly cheaper
than converting to structured XML authoring and will NOT disrupt your
current workflow.

Any other questions, just let me know.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Unstructured to structured FM?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

One other thought is to convert FrameMaker books into a web help system and
deploy that to a web server that anyone in your company could access.
That's a fairly simple exercise to do if you have the technical
communication suite and I can provide a detailed explanation on how to do
that if you are interested.

Joe

On Sat, Mar 24, 2012 at 12:46 PM, Joseph Lorenzini wrote:

> Hi Laura,
>
> I'd recommend talking to Sarah O'Keefe at Scriptorium Publishing. I'd also
> take a look at these:
>
> http://www.scriptorium.com/structure.pdf
> http://www.scriptorium.com/category/resources/xmldita/xml-xmldita/
>
> The key question I'd have is ROI on doing this, since these types of
> conversions can easily cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of man hours.
>
>  It  doesn't sound like your manager has done a cost benefit analysis of
> what it would mean to convert nor has he or she analyzed the business case.
> If all your manager wants to do is "make it easier to share our doc set
> with people in the company", then instead of saying "XML authoring to the
> rescue" I suggest  that you think about *that* and what tools could best
> achieve that (the tool could be XML authoring or something else).
>
> From the preliminary investigations I have done to see if XML authoring
> would be a good idea for my company, I discovered that unless you are doing
> significant localizations, have a massive documentation set, and/or have a
> large technical writing department, making a business case for structured
> authoring will probably be hard.
>
> Off the top of my head, I'd want to know this about your "share content
> with others" situation:
>
>- who in the company do you need to share the content with?
>- If its other technical writers, who need to edit the content, then
>why not put the FrameMaker documentation in a version control repository
>and have those writers user unstructured framemaker to edit the content?
>- If its people, such as sales or developers, who need to consume the
>content and provide feedback, then why not just provide PDFs that are
>enabled for commenting in acrobat reader and then distribute them via NFS?
>- If you need to *collaborate *with departments across the company,
>then why not look at using a wiki?
>
> Note that all of the suggestions I have provided is significantly cheaper
> than converting to structured XML authoring and will NOT disrupt your
> current workflow.
>
> Any other questions, just let me know.
>
> Sincerely,
> Joseph Lorenzini
>
>
>
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Re: FrameMaker 10 Crashes when I do a Find and Replace of a character format

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Richard,

A framemaker engineer has reached out to me and we are currently in the
process of troubleshooting the problem. If we end up identifying what the
problem is and a workaround, I'll be sure to notify the list serve.

Please keep in mind that the Character Format option in the find dialog
box doesn't exist until FM 10.  You can also search for paragraph and
character format overrides which you could not do in previous releases.
Finally, please be aware that this only seems reproducible with some
extremely large books of mine that have been upgraded from FM 9. I can't
reproduce this crash on a smaller book or a book created from scratch, in
those other cases everything works as expected.

In answer to your questions:

1)  I am doing this  because I first want to zero out all the formatting
and then inherit a specific formatting from the body text. this ensures
that i ONLY find text that is bolded and is body text and not finding
bolded paragraphs that are  bolded because of the paragraph format, such as
H1 or H2.

2) I do not  believe I am applying  on top of the format override but
rather replacing the format override with the char tag. When I did my
testing in a single FM file, I tried this once on one piece of text that
had the bold override applied to it. Prior to the the find and replace, I
searched for character format overrides and the find mechanism flagged this
text as having an override. After the find and replace occurred, I searched
for character format overrides and the find mechanism did NOT flag this
text as having an override

3)In the FM data model, my understanding is that part of a character format
is the char tag. So when I do a copy special and copy the character format,
I am getting the character format tag in addition to everything else
associated with the character format.

4) I was doing a find and replace across the entire book. I do this all the
time and when I do I don't have a document open. I've never had a problem
before. In any case, I have experimented with the find and replace when all
the docs are opened and the crash still occurs.

Sincerely,
Joe

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 11:32 AM, Combs, Richard
richard.co...@polycom.comwrote:


 I don't have FM10, but since I don't see any response on the list, I'll
 toss out some questions/comments that occurred to me:

 -- After step 7 (setting the dialog to As Is), why are you doing step 8
 (setting it to the format at the cursor location)?

 -- In step 10, when you apply a character format, I assume you mean a
 defined char tag. Why are you applying it on top of a format override? You
 realize that you're adding the char tag formatting to the override, not
 replacing the override? (At least, that's the case if your char tag is
 properly defined, with non-relevant parameters set to As Is.)

 -- In step 11, you're copying *all* the formatting of the selected text,
 not the char tag itself. IOW, if you select some text that has the Emphasis
 char tag (defined as Italic + As Is) applied, and that text is in a blue
 20-pt Futura heading, what you're copying to the clipboard (and pasting) is
 blue 20-pt Futura Italic.

 -- In step 12, why are you closing all docs? I suspect this is the nut of
 the crashing problem. Although earlier versions of FM, IIRC, display an
 error dialog when you don't have a cursor location.

 HTH!

 Richard G. Combs
 Senior Technical Writer
 Polycom, Inc.
 richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
 303-223-5111
 --
 rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
 303-903-6372
 --







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FrameMaker 10 Crashes when I do a Find and Replace of a character format

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Richard,

A framemaker engineer has reached out to me and we are currently in the
process of troubleshooting the problem. If we end up identifying what the
problem is and a workaround, I'll be sure to notify the list serve.

Please keep in mind that the "Character Format" option in the find dialog
box doesn't exist until FM 10.  You can also search for paragraph and
character format overrides which you could not do in previous releases.
Finally, please be aware that this only seems reproducible with some
extremely large books of mine that have been upgraded from FM 9. I can't
reproduce this crash on a smaller book or a book created from scratch, in
those other cases everything works as expected.

In answer to your questions:

1)  I am doing this  because I first want to zero out all the formatting
and then inherit a specific formatting from the body text. this ensures
that i ONLY find text that is bolded and is body text and not finding
bolded paragraphs that are  bolded because of the paragraph format, such as
H1 or H2.

2) I do not  believe I am applying  on top of the format override but
rather replacing the format override with the char tag. When I did my
testing in a single FM file, I tried this once on one piece of text that
had the bold override applied to it. Prior to the the find and replace, I
searched for character format overrides and the find mechanism flagged this
text as having an override. After the find and replace occurred, I searched
for character format overrides and the find mechanism did NOT flag this
text as having an override

3)In the FM data model, my understanding is that part of a character format
is the char tag. So when I do a copy special and copy the character format,
I am getting the character format tag in addition to everything else
associated with the character format.

4) I was doing a find and replace across the entire book. I do this all the
time and when I do I don't have a document open. I've never had a problem
before. In any case, I have experimented with the find and replace when all
the docs are opened and the crash still occurs.

Sincerely,
Joe

On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 11:32 AM, Combs, Richard
wrote:

>
> I don't have FM10, but since I don't see any response on the list, I'll
> toss out some questions/comments that occurred to me:
>
> -- After step 7 (setting the dialog to As Is), why are you doing step 8
> (setting it to the format at the cursor location)?
>
> -- In step 10, when you "apply a character format," I assume you mean a
> defined char tag. Why are you applying it on top of a format override? You
> realize that you're adding the char tag formatting to the override, not
> replacing the override? (At least, that's the case if your char tag is
> properly defined, with non-relevant parameters set to As Is.)
>
> -- In step 11, you're copying *all* the formatting of the selected text,
> not the char tag itself. IOW, if you select some text that has the Emphasis
> char tag (defined as Italic + As Is) applied, and that text is in a blue
> 20-pt Futura heading, what you're copying to the clipboard (and pasting) is
> blue 20-pt Futura Italic.
>
> -- In step 12, why are you closing all docs? I suspect this is the nut of
> the crashing problem. Although earlier versions of FM, IIRC, display an
> error dialog when you don't have a cursor location.
>
> HTH!
>
> Richard G. Combs
> Senior Technical Writer
> Polycom, Inc.
> richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
> 303-223-5111
> --
> rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
> 303-903-6372
> --
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Phantom character format override in FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I am using the Find Character Format Override option in the find dialog
box. I am constantly getting a hit on the paragraph where a text inset is
inserted. If the paragraph is Body, then it does not find an override. If
however the paragraph format is anchor, then it does find an override. I am
at a loss as to why one paragraph format causes a character format
override to be found while the other does not. I have verified that the
text inset does NOT contain a character format override.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Phantom character format override in FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I am using the "Find Character Format Override" option in the find dialog
box. I am constantly getting a hit on the paragraph where a text inset is
inserted. If the paragraph is "Body", then it does not find an override. If
however the paragraph format is anchor, then it does find an override. I am
at a loss as to why one paragraph format causes a "character format
override" to be found while the other does not. I have verified that the
text inset does NOT contain a character format override.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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FrameMaker 10 Crashes when I do a Find and Replace of a character format

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all:

If I do a find and replace of a character format across an entire book,
Framemaker sucks up all the memory on my system and then crashes. I was
wondering if anyone else has seen this behavior.

Steps to Reproduce

1. create a large book that contains several hundred pages and many
framemaker files. Ideally, there should be 20 or so files in it.
2. through out the book, highlight text and then press ctrl+b. This applies
a character format override of bold.
3.  open a framemaker doc from the book.
4. place your cursor in some  body text.
5. open the find dialog box.
6. Set find to character format.
7. In the find char format dialog box, press shift+F8.
8. In the find char format dialog box, press shift+F9.
9. in th find char format dialog box, set the weight to bold and then click
the set button.
10. in the framemaker doc, find some text that has bold override applied to
it and then apply a character format.
11. Use the copy special to copy the character format to your clipboard.
12. close all documents.
13. make sure the book is active.
14. in the find dialog box, set change to by pasting.
15. select the find button.

System Specs:
Win 7, 64 bit
Processor: Intel Core i5
8 GB of RAM
solid state drive
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FrameMaker 10 Crashes when I do a Find and Replace of a character format

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all:

If I do a find and replace of a character format across an entire book,
Framemaker sucks up all the memory on my system and then crashes. I was
wondering if anyone else has seen this behavior.

Steps to Reproduce

1. create a large book that contains several hundred pages and many
framemaker files. Ideally, there should be 20 or so files in it.
2. through out the book, highlight text and then press ctrl+b. This applies
a character format override of bold.
3.  open a framemaker doc from the book.
4. place your cursor in some  body text.
5. open the find dialog box.
6. Set find to character format.
7. In the find char format dialog box, press shift+F8.
8. In the find char format dialog box, press shift+F9.
9. in th find char format dialog box, set the weight to bold and then click
the set button.
10. in the framemaker doc, find some text that has bold override applied to
it and then apply a character format.
11. Use the copy special to copy the character format to your clipboard.
12. close all documents.
13. make sure the book is active.
14. in the find dialog box, set change to "by pasting".
15. select the find button.

System Specs:
Win 7, 64 bit
Processor: Intel Core i5
8 GB of RAM
solid state drive
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Batch PDF processing for enabling commenting in acrobat reader

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have TCS 3.5. I am using FrameMaker 10 and Adobe Acrobat Pro X. When I
publish my documentation, I would like people to review the PDFs by putting
comments in acrobat reader. To do this, I have to go into each PDF and
select File  Save As  Reader Extended PDF   Enable Commenting and
Measuring.  Is there any way to turn this into a batch process that will
automatically convert all the PDFs in a single folder?

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Batch PDF processing for enabling commenting in acrobat reader

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have TCS 3.5. I am using FrameMaker 10 and Adobe Acrobat Pro X. When I
publish my documentation, I would like people to review the PDFs by putting
comments in acrobat reader. To do this, I have to go into each PDF and
select File > Save As > Reader Extended PDF >  Enable Commenting and
Measuring.  Is there any way to turn this into a batch process that will
automatically convert all the PDFs in a single folder?

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Re: hotkey bug in FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Clint,

Yes you are right. Matt in the TCS-Group was the first person to suggest
this to me. I guess I never saw this behavior before because my focus is
usually in the document itself. I am just glad there's a straight forward
way to keep on calling both pods with hot keys.

Thanks,
Joe

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 9:40 AM, Owen, Clint
clint.o...@craneaerospace.comwrote:

 **
 Joseph,

 With FM10 and WinXP what you describe is true if you don't move the
 curser. If you move the curser to a new location after opening the
 Paragraph, Character, or Table designer you can open either of the others
 with the keyboard shortcut. It seems to work in any order, but you have to
 move the curser each time.

 Clint
 **

 ** **

 Clint Owen | Sr. Technical Writer | Crane Aerospace  Electronics |
 +1 425 743 8674 | Fax: +1 425 743 8113


  --
 *From:* framers-boun...@lists.frameusers.com [mailto:
 framers-boun...@lists.frameusers.com] *On Behalf Of *Joseph Lorenzini
 *Sent:* Friday, November 18, 2011 8:42 AM
 *To:* tcs-us...@googlegroups.com; FrameMaker Forum

 *Subject:* hotkey bug in FrameMaker 10

 Hi all,

 I have the TCS 3.5. I was wondering if anyone else was seeing the
 following issue. To bring up the paragraph designer pod, one users the
 hotkey *ctrl+m*. To bring up the character designer pod, one uses the
 hotkey* ctrl+d*. I noticed that if i bring up the characer designer, then
 I can not use a hotkey to bring up the paragraph designer. The converse is
 true as well, where if i have brought up the paragraph designer then a hot
 key cannot bring up the character designer.

 Anyone else seeing this?

 Sincerely,
 Joseph Lorenzini
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hotkey bug in FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have the TCS 3.5. I was wondering if anyone else was seeing the following
issue. To bring up the paragraph designer pod, one users the hotkey *ctrl+m*.
To bring up the character designer pod, one uses the hotkey* ctrl+d*. I
noticed that if i bring up the characer designer, then I can not use a
hotkey to bring up the paragraph designer. The converse is true as well,
where if i have brought up the paragraph designer then a hot key cannot
bring up the character designer.

Anyone else seeing this?

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Re: Importing PDF Comments into FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I actually think I figured out the problem here. If a block of text is being
edited (deleted or replaced) and the text happens to contain content that
cannot be in track text (TT) edits , such as variables, and xrefs, then a
marker is created which contains the edit. The track text edits only work if
the content being edited is only text.

I did not realize this. I assumed the text surrounding the marker text would
be placed in TT edits and only thing that cannot be in a TT edit would be in
the marker. I must say this significantly reduces the usability of importing
PDF comments into FrameMaker. its not as if a reviewer is going to know that
a variable is the PDF and he should avoid editing it so it can show up as
track text edits in FM.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Acrobat Pro X is Slow

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I recently upgraded from TCS 2.5 to TCS 3.5. This means I went from Acrobat
9 Pro Extended to Acrobat X Professional. Has anyone else noticed a
significant slowness in opening and navigating through PDFs in 10 compared
to 9? I have 8 GB of RAM and a solid state drive for pete sake and Acrobat X
still noticeably lags when loading a PDF, selecting a link etc. According to
this forum post, I am not alone.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3796164

One suggestion was to disable the enhanced security, which I did. Once I
did, I did notice a small improvement in speed but nothing enormous. The
most expensive operation is opening the comment pane to review the
commands made in a PDF. Scrolling through the list or selecting a comment
almost makes the PDF hang. And of course, reviewing PDF comments is
basically the only reason I use Acrobat.

Also, please keep in mind that this is after TWO reinstalls of the entire
TCS 3.5 suite.

At this point, I am thinking about just using Acrobat Reader 9 to review
comments, which I find pathetic.  I find it unbelievable that adobe would
release product with this amount instability.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini


PS Can someone explain to me why you can't resize the comment pane in
Acrobat Pro X? And yes that's more of a rhetorical question. :(
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Importing PDF Comments into FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I actually think I figured out the problem here. If a block of text is being
edited (deleted or replaced) and the text happens to contain content that
cannot be in track text (TT) edits , such as variables, and xrefs, then a
marker is created which contains the edit. The track text edits only work if
the content being edited is only text.

I did not realize this. I assumed the text surrounding the marker text would
be placed in TT edits and only thing that cannot be in a TT edit would be in
the marker. I must say this significantly reduces the usability of importing
PDF comments into FrameMaker. its not as if a reviewer is going to know that
a variable is the PDF and he should avoid editing it so it can show up as
track text edits in FM.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Acrobat Pro X is Slow

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I recently upgraded from TCS 2.5 to TCS 3.5. This means I went from Acrobat
9 Pro Extended to Acrobat X Professional. Has anyone else noticed a
significant slowness in opening and navigating through PDFs in 10 compared
to 9? I have 8 GB of RAM and a solid state drive for pete sake and Acrobat X
still noticeably lags when loading a PDF, selecting a link etc. According to
this forum post, I am not alone.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3796164

One suggestion was to disable the enhanced security, which I did. Once I
did, I did notice a small improvement in speed but nothing enormous. The
most "expensive" operation is opening the comment pane to review the
commands made in a PDF. Scrolling through the list or selecting a comment
almost makes the PDF hang. And of course, reviewing PDF comments is
basically the only reason I use Acrobat.

Also, please keep in mind that this is after TWO reinstalls of the entire
TCS 3.5 suite.

At this point, I am thinking about just using Acrobat Reader 9 to review
comments, which I find pathetic.  I find it unbelievable that adobe would
release product with this amount instability.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini


PS Can someone explain to me why you can't resize the comment pane in
Acrobat Pro X? And yes that's more of a rhetorical question. :(
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Importing PDF Comments into FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I just recently upgraded to TCS 3.5. I am doing the following:

1. create a tagged pdf from a framemaker book.
2. made comments in the pdf
3. imported the PDF comments into the framemaker book.

I am noticing the following:

-any time I do an import into the book, the comments are imported as markers
instead of presenting as track changes. I am making sure to only modify text
(as opposed to text insets, xrefs, etc). How do I get it to show up as track
changes?
-i can't seem to successfully import pdf comments if I generate a single
document as opposed to the whole book. No idea why.

Did see this post but its not exactly on point. In any case, it sounds like
importing PDF comments is pretty bug in FM 10, which is really frustrating
for such an important feature.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3926495#3926495

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Importing PDF Comments into FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I just recently upgraded to TCS 3.5. I am doing the following:

1. create a tagged pdf from a framemaker book.
2. made comments in the pdf
3. imported the PDF comments into the framemaker book.

I am noticing the following:

-any time I do an import into the book, the comments are imported as markers
instead of presenting as track changes. I am making sure to only modify text
(as opposed to text insets, xrefs, etc). How do I get it to show up as track
changes?
-i can't seem to successfully import pdf comments if I generate a single
document as opposed to the whole book. No idea why.

Did see this post but its not exactly on point. In any case, it sounds like
importing PDF comments is pretty bug in FM 10, which is really frustrating
for such an important feature.

http://forums.adobe.com/message/3926495#3926495

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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FrameMaker 10 Generates Read Only PDFs

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I recently upgraded from TCS 2.0 to TCS 3.5. I have FrameMaker 10 and
Acrobat X.

I am experiencing an incredibly frustrating behavior. Whenever I generate a
PDF from FrameMaker 10, the PDF is read only. If I make a change to the PDF,
an error message displays that says:

The document could not be saved. The file may be read only, or another user
may have it open. Please save the document with a different name or in a
different folder.

If I attempt to delete the document, it says:

The action can't be completed because the file is open in Acrobat.exe.

Except I don't have Acrobat open!! I have to reboot my machine in order to
delete the PDF. I find this to be absolutely ridiculous. If anyone can
provide suggestions about how to troubleshoot this issue, please let me know

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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unstable printing process for FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I just upgraded from TCS 2.0 to TCS 3.5. This means I upgraded from
FrameMaker 9 to FrameMaker 10. I am noticing what seems to be a buggy
behavior when I print to PDF in FrameMaker 10. Semi-frequently, when I print
a file from a book or the entire book, FrameMaker freezes and crashes. Then,
the print job is still in the adobe PDF printer's queue and I have to
manually uninstall and reinstall the printer to get things working again.

I find this absolutely maddening. I am praying that there's something wrong
with my system and not a bug between FrameMaker 10 and Acrobat X
integration. I would find it appalling if there was a bug.  I did not see
this behavior at all in FrameMaker 9.

Note that currently I installed TCS 3.5 on top of TCS 2.0. That means I have
FrameMaker 9 and FrameMaker 10 installed at the same time though I don't
know why that would cause any problems.

Here are my system specs:
Windows 7, 64-bit
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU
4 GB of RAM

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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FrameMaker 10 Generates Read Only PDFs

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I recently upgraded from TCS 2.0 to TCS 3.5. I have FrameMaker 10 and
Acrobat X.

I am experiencing an incredibly frustrating behavior. Whenever I generate a
PDF from FrameMaker 10, the PDF is read only. If I make a change to the PDF,
an error message displays that says:

The document could not be saved. The file may be read only, or another user
may have it open. Please save the document with a different name or in a
different folder.

If I attempt to delete the document, it says:

The action can't be completed because the file is open in Acrobat.exe.

Except I don't have Acrobat open!! I have to reboot my machine in order to
delete the PDF. I find this to be absolutely ridiculous. If anyone can
provide suggestions about how to troubleshoot this issue, please let me know

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Classes for FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I just purchased the technical communication suite 3.5. I am looking for
FrameMaker 10 classes that teach the following:

-how to convert from unstructured to structured framemaker. I am interested
in both DITA and custom structures (I haven't decided which way I want to
go).
-creating ExtendScripts to automate documentation tasks

I know there are plenty of classes for this out there. But I am interested
in your recommendations. Cost isn't a huge issue but obviously the most bang
for the buck is always a good thing. One really huge value added is in
person training. I am not saying that a webinar is out of the question but
in my experience learning in person is far superior. I work in the Chicago
land area, if the classes were provided there that's a big plus to me.

Sincerely
Joseph Lorenzini
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Classes for FrameMaker 10

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I just purchased the technical communication suite 3.5. I am looking for
FrameMaker 10 classes that teach the following:

-how to convert from unstructured to structured framemaker. I am interested
in both DITA and custom structures (I haven't decided which way I want to
go).
-creating ExtendScripts to automate documentation tasks

I know there are plenty of classes for this out there. But I am interested
in your recommendations. Cost isn't a huge issue but obviously the most bang
for the buck is always a good thing. One really huge value added is in
person training. I am not saying that a webinar is out of the question but
in my experience learning in person is far superior. I work in the Chicago
land area, if the classes were provided there that's a big plus to me.

Sincerely
Joseph Lorenzini
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Mysterious Master Page Overrides in FrameMaker 9

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

Recently, I noticed when I switch from a master page to body page view I get
a message about master page overrides on the body pages. I find it odd since
I haven't actually modified body pages to cause this override message (or at
least not intentionally). Frankly, I don't care why it happened I just want
to make error message go away. I have tried reapplying master pages, book
updates etc but nothing works except manually deleting each page its
complaining about it. Its kinda maddening. Anyone have an idea about how to
get rid of these overrides aside from manually deleting each page that
overrides on it (that are invisible to my naked eye!!)

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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FrameMaker 9 Crashing

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

In the last week, I started experiencing intermittent crashes of FrameMaker
9. I have not noticed any particular pattern of actions that seems to cause
the crash. I will have FrameMaker open for some period of time and then it
crashes. The last crashed happened as I was fixing a broken cross ref that
linked to a heading in another file. FM crashed as I was fixing the link in
the cross ref dialog box. Not sure if that's related. Also, the crash
reports have different internal error codes so it seems doubtful that its
the exact same issue but its not like I can decipher what those are trying
to say anyway so who knows :). Please note that I ran FrameMaker 9 without a
problem on Windows XP SP3. I recently upgraded to Windows 7 and have been
successfully using FM9 for about a month and a half since then.

I can of course forward the crash reports if someone thinks that would be
helpful for diagnosing the problem. I am tempted to just uninstall
FrameMaker completely and then delete the left over data in the user
directories. Though since I have TCS 2.0 maybe I should delete the whole
thing and reinstall that but what a pain. That takes forever to install!!

Here are my specs:
Technical Communication 2.0
FrameMaker 9.0p255
Windows 7 Enterprise, 64-bit
4 GB of RAM
Intel Core 2 Duo

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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FrameMaker 9 Crashing

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

In the last week, I started experiencing intermittent crashes of FrameMaker
9. I have not noticed any particular pattern of actions that seems to cause
the crash. I will have FrameMaker open for some period of time and then it
crashes. The last crashed happened as I was fixing a broken cross ref that
linked to a heading in another file. FM crashed as I was fixing the link in
the cross ref dialog box. Not sure if that's related. Also, the crash
reports have different internal error codes so it seems doubtful that its
the exact same issue but its not like I can decipher what those are trying
to say anyway so who knows :). Please note that I ran FrameMaker 9 without a
problem on Windows XP SP3. I recently upgraded to Windows 7 and have been
successfully using FM9 for about a month and a half since then.

I can of course forward the crash reports if someone thinks that would be
helpful for diagnosing the problem. I am tempted to just uninstall
FrameMaker completely and then delete the left over data in the user
directories. Though since I have TCS 2.0 maybe I should delete the whole
thing and reinstall that but what a pain. That takes forever to install!!

Here are my specs:
Technical Communication 2.0
FrameMaker 9.0p255
Windows 7 Enterprise, 64-bit
4 GB of RAM
Intel Core 2 Duo

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Re: bugs in FM 9's conditional build expressions

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Baruch,

Here is the information you requested.

Operating System:

Windows 7 Enterprise
4 GB Memory
64-bit
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU

FrameMaker:

Version: 9
Patch: 255

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 2:51 AM, Baruch Brodersen bar...@technitext.comwrote:

 Hi Joseph,

 Please provide Frame version, patches, and operating system details.
 Best,
 Baruch


 On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 9:04 PM, Joseph Lorenzini jalo...@gmail.comwrote:

 Hi all,

 Recently my company has decided to release several different editions of
 the product we sell. This has forced me to create several conditional tags.
 The complexity of the conditional tags and how its applied in the document
 makes the use of build expressions highly desirable. However, it seems like
 this functionality is kinda buggy.

 Has anyone noticed the following:

 -you cannot import build expressions from one document to another. that's
 a killer. Is there some way around this aside from hand editing mif files?
 -deleting unused build expressions requires me to save the FM file as a
 MIF file, open the MIF file in  a text editor, delete the conditional build
 expressions, and then save the MIF back to FM format. Is it honestly the
 case that Adobe didn't provide a delete button and this is the only way to
 get rid of expressions?
 -when i use a build expression, my condition indicators don't seem to
 work. Anyone have an idea why?

 Sincerely,
 Joseph Lorenzini

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 --
 B a r u c h   B r o d e r s e n
 T e c h n i t e x t   D o c u m e n t a t i o n
 0 5 4  9 4 9  9 3 6 1

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bugs in FM 9's conditional build expressions

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

Recently my company has decided to release several different editions of the
product we sell. This has forced me to create several conditional tags. The
complexity of the conditional tags and how its applied in the document makes
the use of build expressions highly desirable. However, it seems like this
functionality is kinda buggy.

Has anyone noticed the following:

-you cannot import build expressions from one document to another. that's a
killer. Is there some way around this aside from hand editing mif files?
-deleting unused build expressions requires me to save the FM file as a MIF
file, open the MIF file in  a text editor, delete the conditional build
expressions, and then save the MIF back to FM format. Is it honestly the
case that Adobe didn't provide a delete button and this is the only way to
get rid of expressions?
-when i use a build expression, my condition indicators don't seem to work.
Anyone have an idea why?

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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OT: job posting

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

A recruiter contacted me concerning an entry level tech writer position in
downtown Chicago, IL. They are looking for someone with 2 to 4 years of
experience and with proficiency in adobe framemaker. Please let me stress
that this is an entry level position, they are not considering any one with
more than a couple of years of experience. If anyone is interested, please
contact me offline and I'll provide all the details.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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OT: job posting

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

A recruiter contacted me concerning an entry level tech writer position in
downtown Chicago, IL. They are looking for someone with 2 to 4 years of
experience and with proficiency in adobe framemaker. Please let me stress
that this is an entry level position, they are not considering any one with
more than a couple of years of experience. If anyone is interested, please
contact me offline and I'll provide all the details.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Training and Tools for DITA

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have a colleague who may want to make the jump into DITA. I am old school
with unstructured FrameMaker but I know there's plenty out there but I'd
like to get recommendations from you all. I am looking for FrameMaker
plugins for 1) converting unstructured framemaker 9 files into DITA  and 2)
that help with DITA authoring in general, though I believe FrameMaker's out
of the box capabilities are pretty decent. Also, are there some good DITA
tutorials out there? Cost is an issue for my colleague so closer to free
would be preferable :).

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Training and Tools for DITA

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have a colleague who may want to make the jump into DITA. I am old school
with unstructured FrameMaker but I know there's plenty out there but I'd
like to get recommendations from you all. I am looking for FrameMaker
plugins for 1) converting unstructured framemaker 9 files into DITA  and 2)
that help with DITA authoring in general, though I believe FrameMaker's out
of the box capabilities are pretty decent. Also, are there some good DITA
tutorials out there? Cost is an issue for my colleague so closer to free
would be preferable :).

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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Re: OT: Any opinions on creating online help?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Gay,

It depends on what exactly you are looking to do, the level of quality you
expect, and the output that you need the help system to be in. It also
depends on what software you currently have. I am assuming your criteria is
1) inexpensive and 2) low learning curve 3) can generate a help system from
FrameMaker books.

So if you have the technical communication suite, then your best is to
import FrameMaker books into RoboHelp. Its the cheapest solution since its
already provided to you out of the box and as long as you have a basic
understanding of CSS and HTML the learning curve isn't too bad. Now with
that said, there is some incredibly annoying gotchas in TCS 2.0 (don't even
get me started on the horrible job it does handling numbering). I have been
making help systems this way for about 2 years and I can walk you through
the process if you want.

If you don't have TCS and need to purchase help system solution, then I
don't think you can beat mif2go. I don't have a lot of experience with this
but its 1) been around forever 2) its dirt cheap compared to other tools out
there 3)it produces excellent help output and 4) people who use it swear by
it. The one downside is the learning curve could be considered somewhat
steep. Its all based on setting up configuration files and its not really
GUI based. You can get a demo version to test for yourself.

http://www.omsys.com/dcl/mif2gopg.htm

The other big one I have heard of but have not used personally myself is
madcap flare. I've seen mixed reviews on this one. Some people say its the
best things since sliced bread. Others says it has a steep learning curve
and does not produce the best results. I have no experience with the product
so I can't give you an opinion on that one way or the other.

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/flare/overview.aspx#introduction

There are other solutions out there but that gets into using structured
FrameMaker authoring and enterprise XML solutions. This gets very pricey
very quickly and usually has a very steep learning curve so I won't get into
those here.

Hope that helps.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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OT: Any opinions on creating online help?

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Gay,

It depends on what exactly you are looking to do, the level of quality you
expect, and the output that you need the help system to be in. It also
depends on what software you currently have. I am assuming your criteria is
1) inexpensive and 2) low learning curve 3) can generate a help system from
FrameMaker books.

So if you have the technical communication suite, then your best is to
import FrameMaker books into RoboHelp. Its the cheapest solution since its
already provided to you out of the box and as long as you have a basic
understanding of CSS and HTML the learning curve isn't too bad. Now with
that said, there is some incredibly annoying gotchas in TCS 2.0 (don't even
get me started on the horrible job it does handling numbering). I have been
making help systems this way for about 2 years and I can walk you through
the process if you want.

If you don't have TCS and need to purchase help system solution, then I
don't think you can beat mif2go. I don't have a lot of experience with this
but its 1) been around forever 2) its dirt cheap compared to other tools out
there 3)it produces excellent help output and 4) people who use it swear by
it. The one downside is the learning curve could be considered somewhat
steep. Its all based on setting up configuration files and its not really
GUI based. You can get a demo version to test for yourself.

http://www.omsys.com/dcl/mif2gopg.htm

The other big one I have heard of but have not used personally myself is
madcap flare. I've seen mixed reviews on this one. Some people say its the
best things since sliced bread. Others says it has a steep learning curve
and does not produce the best results. I have no experience with the product
so I can't give you an opinion on that one way or the other.

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/products/flare/overview.aspx#introduction

There are other solutions out there but that gets into using structured
FrameMaker authoring and enterprise XML solutions. This gets very pricey
very quickly and usually has a very steep learning curve so I won't get into
those here.

Hope that helps.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
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DPI Recommendation for Images

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I'd like to get people's opinion on what they think is the best choice for
DPI. Right now I import images into FrameMaker at a DPI of 144. This means
that the PDF must be zoomed to 150% if the image pixels are to match the
monitor pixels (i.e. it would be like zooming it to 100%).  However, I set
the default zoom in the PDFs to 125% because I thought that 150% was just
too big and overwhelming in a PDF. This means that the images look degraded.
I'd like to improve this.

As I see it, I have two options.

(1) In FrameMaker, I could change each image's DPI to 120. This means that
the image would NOT look degraded in a PDF at a zoom level of 125%. The
drawbacks are two fold: 1) I have an enormous amount of documentation and it
would take a considerable amount of time changing the DPIs for each image
though I suspect there may be a plugin out there that could automate this
process for each book. 2) Images would be noticeably bigger and take up more
space in the documentation.

(2) I could set the default zoom in the PDFs to 150%. The upside to this is
that its a very trivial change. The downside is that the PDFs would be
enormous. On a monitor resolution of 1200x1600 it looks big but ok, whereas
on 1024x768 I find it to be too large to be readable. Admittedly, I am
assuming that most users in a corporate environment would have monitors with
a maximum resolution of 1200x1600 but I don't know for sure.  Plus, not
everyone likes a res that high.

So what say you all? Which option do you favor and why? And of course, if
there's another option I haven't thought please let me know.

Thanks,
Joe
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DPI Recommendation for Images

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I'd like to get people's opinion on what they think is the best choice for
DPI. Right now I import images into FrameMaker at a DPI of 144. This means
that the PDF must be zoomed to 150% if the image pixels are to match the
monitor pixels (i.e. it would be like zooming it to 100%).  However, I set
the default zoom in the PDFs to 125% because I thought that 150% was just
too big and overwhelming in a PDF. This means that the images look degraded.
I'd like to improve this.

As I see it, I have two options.

(1) In FrameMaker, I could change each image's DPI to 120. This means that
the image would NOT look degraded in a PDF at a zoom level of 125%. The
drawbacks are two fold: 1) I have an enormous amount of documentation and it
would take a considerable amount of time changing the DPIs for each image
though I suspect there may be a plugin out there that could automate this
process for each book. 2) Images would be noticeably bigger and take up more
space in the documentation.

(2) I could set the default zoom in the PDFs to 150%. The upside to this is
that its a very trivial change. The downside is that the PDFs would be
enormous. On a monitor resolution of 1200x1600 it looks big but ok, whereas
on 1024x768 I find it to be too large to be readable. Admittedly, I am
assuming that most users in a corporate environment would have monitors with
a maximum resolution of 1200x1600 but I don't know for sure.  Plus, not
everyone likes a res that high.

So what say you all? Which option do you favor and why? And of course, if
there's another option I haven't thought please let me know.

Thanks,
Joe
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OT:Tool and Company Recommendations for Documentation Project

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all:


I have a colleague who is starting a small business. The business has two
specific documentation needs: 1) create a questionnaire and 2) create a
specifications sheet.

The questionnaire is probably a 40 page document with a mixture of open
ended questions and some other more restricted answers (check boxes,
selections etc). Colleague wants to avoid the annoyance one experiences with
a lot of form documents (e.g., word) where a bit too much text throws the
formatting off for the rest of the document etc.

The Specification Sheet is an agreement between the company and the customer
(not a legal document as those are separate). It would contain lots of
details and would ideally have an appendix or something that allows images
etc of customer selections that can be hyperlinked. The specification
document (may apply to questionnaire too but less critical) must be able to
identify changes made after the specification is agreed upon. So if the
customer changes mind about something, my colleauge can mark the
specification document with the time, circumstance and nature of the change
in the specification document.

While he would try to maximize the online access to these documents, both
variety would have to be printed (with change indications).

So given that scenario:

1) What software tools do you believe would be good for this sort of thing?

2) Do you know of any companies that help in authorizing these types of
documents?

3) Any other avenues we should look at?


Here are my answers, but I'd be interested in what others have to say:


1) What software tools do you believe would be good for this sort of thing?

For questionnaire: I'd purchase Acrobat Pro X. This suite of products comes
with a program called Adobe LifeCycle Designer. This program is a
point-and-click graphical form design tool that simplifies the creation of
forms. You can fill a form online, submit the data, and print it, or print
and fill the form by hand. You can design a form, define its logic, and
modify it to match paper counterparts. This program easily allows to create
open ended questions, drop-down menus, check boxes etc.

For specification: I'd tentatively recommend Adobe FrameMaker. Its extremely
stable (you can scale this up to a hundred of pages without risk of
corrupting anything) and makes it very easy to handle layout of images and
text. Its also very easy to hyperlink images. Framemaker also has the
ability to handle track changes and can automatically generate a change bar
for content that has changed. However, marking the change information would
be a manual process, which I don't know if that's acceptable or not. Also,
FrameMaker does have a moderate learning curve so you'd probably have to
spend one or two days getting a feel for the product. Also, the nice thing
thing is you could generate a PDF, enable it for commenting, send it to your
customer, the customer could makes comments in the PDF, and your brother
could import the comments into his FrameMaker document allowing him to make
changes on his own terms.

2) Do you know of any companies that help in authorizing these types of
documents?

I don't have an answer for this one. If anyone knows of any companies please
let me know.


3) Any other avenues we should look at?

I suggested that he just contract this work out so he can avoid the hassle
of documentation


Sincerely,

Joseph Lorenzini
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Re: SVN Diffs in FrameMaker

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

Based on the responses that I have gotten, I realized I was not being very
clear about what I asking for. All version control systems have the same
problem: how can someone view and edit the same data but prevent the users
from overwriting each others changes. This is especially problematic when
two or more users edits the same file at the same time. Depending who
commits to the repository first, the other person's changes could be lost or
overwritten.

As far I know there are two models for handling this in tortoise svn:
Lock-Modify-Unlock and Copy-Modify-Merge. The Lock model is basically like a
network share, where the user checks out a file (locks it), which prevents
anyone else from editing that file until the user who checked out saves and
closes the file (or in this case commits the changes into the repository).
The Copy model means each user has a local copy of the same file, each
person makes their changes, and then commit those changes to the repository.
The SVN client would then be responsible for automatically merging the two
different versions into one final version and committing that version
(including changes from all users) into the repository.

I want to use the Copy-Modify-Merge model in framemaker but I can't  because
there's no utility that will automatically track the deltas in different
local copies and then merge the changes automatically. If I had this, I'd
have a system that

   - attempts to automatically merge received changes with local changes
   during svn update or svn merge
   - Show the differences between two versions of the same FrameMaker file
   as part of svn diff
   - Show line-by-line attribution for svn blame
   - multiple users can edit the same file at the same time, and when the
   users commit their changes subversion will merge them into a single file
   automatically.

Within that context, my system admin told me that this merging functionality
can be done by a third party tool which the SVN client could link into.
That's what I am looking for.

Steve Johnson suggested I commit MIFs instead. This in theory could work but
I don't think its scalable and would have significant negative impact on my
productivity. I have a very large documentation set. In 2 or 3 day time span
i will have changed many, many different FrameMaker files. For this MIF
commit strategy to work, I'd have to manually save the files to MIF each
time I make a commit. I dont' think I'd want to go down that route. Plus, by
making this process manual, the potential human error is far greater. What
if a user fails to save as mif and instead commits a frame file etc?

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini

PS I don't know about anyone else but I find the built framemaker diffing
capability to be useless with large scale changes. The way it organizes and
tracks changes produces so much noise its hard to identify anything useful.
This would be a tangent but I'd be interested to hear if anyone's managed to
make the diffing functionality work on a large scale that is usable.
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Re: SVN Diffs in FrameMaker

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Steven,

I find your response both confusing and incredibly peculiar.

I actually never said nor implied that multiple writers work on the same
files and don't talk to each other. I have no idea where you got that idea.
In fact, we communicate all the time  and its a time consuming process.
Right now to ensure that all the changes are merged together, I have to go
through and set up a methodical, step-by-step process with the other
writers. Furthermore because I am the only full time technical writer, I
have to frequently work with short term contractors that have little
knowledge of my documentation processes. Even with communication, the
chances for a mistake to be made just comes with the territory of a newbie.


*The whole point of my post was to find an automated process for
collaborating on FrameMaker documentation that significantly reduces the
chance of humor error -- not switch from one manual process to another*. I
want to optimize my workflow and manually saving and committing MIFs did not
sound like that would fit the bill.  In the first email I sent out, I
specifically asked if there was custom solution (eg some script) that would
automate the SVN merge process, which I could purchase. You never mentioned
in anything about scripting in your one line response, nor pointed to a
third party tool that would so. Therefore, I assumed you were describing a
manual process, otherwise why would you mention it?

In any case, I now infer from your latest response that you believe that if
someone does not have the ability to create their own script or code to
accomplish task, then they should not bother with solving rpoblems and
instead just stick to manual, time consuming procedure. I don't know why you
are opposed to the idea of purchasing tools from a third party to accomplish
a task but that's what I want. So I guess we'll just have to agree to
disagree.

For example, if someone has a script that would automatically convert my
FrameMaker files into MIFs, merge changes from other writers, and then
commit them to the repository, then that could be promising. Though, I'd
also, want the ability to check out the mif files and use the script to
convert them into Framemaker files (I manage over 30 books and 2,000 pages
of documentation mostly by myself).

I am also not sure how SVN blame and diffing would work with MIF files. I
tried it before with tortoise svn and while it did diff the mif files, it
failed to display human readable text.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini




On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 1:06 PM, Steve Johnson chinask...@gmail.com wrote:

 So don't do that? You're saying that multiple writers work on the same
 files and don't talk to each other? Given that, you will never get
 anything to work properly.

 A group of 20 writers checked in and out MIFs successfully for two
 years or more. It is not a negative impact to anything if you do it
 right. All you need is a way to script from FM  MIF  FM. Plus, SVN
 most likely stores the diffs only so you're saving a lot of space in
 the repository by not checking in binary FM files.

 If you can't script it then don't do it.

 On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Joseph Lorenzini
 panoptico...@gmail.com wrote:
  Hi all,
 
  Based on the responses that I have gotten, I realized I was not being
 very
  clear about what I asking for. All version control systems have the same
  problem: how can someone view and edit the same data but prevent the
 users
  from overwriting each others changes. This is especially problematic when
  two or more users edits the same file at the same time. Depending who
  commits to the repository first, the other person's changes could be lost
 or
  overwritten.
 
  As far I know there are two models for handling this in tortoise svn:
  Lock-Modify-Unlock and Copy-Modify-Merge. The Lock model is basically
 like a
  network share, where the user checks out a file (locks it), which
 prevents
  anyone else from editing that file until the user who checked out saves
 and
  closes the file (or in this case commits the changes into the
 repository).
  The Copy model means each user has a local copy of the same file, each
  person makes their changes, and then commit those changes to the
 repository.
  The SVN client would then be responsible for automatically merging the
 two
  different versions into one final version and committing that version
  (including changes from all users) into the repository.
 
  I want to use the Copy-Modify-Merge model in framemaker but I can't
 because
  there's no utility that will automatically track the deltas in different
  local copies and then merge the changes automatically. If I had this, I'd
  have a system that
 
  attempts to automatically merge received changes with local changes
 during
  svn update or svn merge
  Show the differences between two versions of the same FrameMaker file as
  part of svn diff
  Show line-by-line attribution for svn blame
  multiple users can edit the same file

SVN Diffs in FrameMaker

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

Based on the responses that I have gotten, I realized I was not being very
clear about what I asking for. All version control systems have the same
problem: how can someone view and edit the same data but prevent the users
from overwriting each others changes. This is especially problematic when
two or more users edits the same file at the same time. Depending who
commits to the repository first, the other person's changes could be lost or
overwritten.

As far I know there are two models for handling this in tortoise svn:
Lock-Modify-Unlock and Copy-Modify-Merge. The Lock model is basically like a
network share, where the user checks out a file (locks it), which prevents
anyone else from editing that file until the user who checked out saves and
closes the file (or in this case commits the changes into the repository).
The Copy model means each user has a local copy of the same file, each
person makes their changes, and then commit those changes to the repository.
The SVN client would then be responsible for automatically merging the two
different versions into one final version and committing that version
(including changes from all users) into the repository.

I want to use the Copy-Modify-Merge model in framemaker but I can't  because
there's no utility that will automatically track the deltas in different
local copies and then merge the changes automatically. If I had this, I'd
have a system that

   - attempts to automatically merge received changes with local changes
   during svn update or svn merge
   - Show the differences between two versions of the same FrameMaker file
   as part of svn diff
   - Show line-by-line attribution for svn blame
   - multiple users can edit the same file at the same time, and when the
   users commit their changes subversion will merge them into a single file
   automatically.

Within that context, my system admin told me that this merging functionality
can be done by a third party tool which the SVN client could link into.
That's what I am looking for.

Steve Johnson suggested I commit MIFs instead. This in theory could work but
I don't think its scalable and would have significant negative impact on my
productivity. I have a very large documentation set. In 2 or 3 day time span
i will have changed many, many different FrameMaker files. For this MIF
commit strategy to work, I'd have to manually save the files to MIF each
time I make a commit. I dont' think I'd want to go down that route. Plus, by
making this process manual, the potential human error is far greater. What
if a user fails to save as mif and instead commits a frame file etc?

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini

PS I don't know about anyone else but I find the built framemaker diffing
capability to be useless with large scale changes. The way it organizes and
tracks changes produces so much noise its hard to identify anything useful.
This would be a tangent but I'd be interested to hear if anyone's managed to
make the diffing functionality work on a large scale that is usable.

SVN Diffs in FrameMaker

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi Steven,

I find your response both confusing and incredibly peculiar.

I actually never said nor implied that multiple writers work on the same
files and don't talk to each other. I have no idea where you got that idea.
In fact, we communicate all the time  and its a time consuming process.
Right now to ensure that all the changes are merged together, I have to go
through and set up a methodical, step-by-step process with the other
writers. Furthermore because I am the only full time technical writer, I
have to frequently work with short term contractors that have little
knowledge of my documentation processes. Even with communication, the
chances for a mistake to be made just comes with the territory of a newbie.


*The whole point of my post was to find an automated process for
collaborating on FrameMaker documentation that significantly reduces the
chance of humor error -- not switch from one manual process to another*. I
want to optimize my workflow and manually saving and committing MIFs did not
sound like that would fit the bill.  In the first email I sent out, I
specifically asked if there was custom solution (eg some script) that would
automate the SVN merge process, which I could purchase. You never mentioned
in anything about scripting in your one line response, nor pointed to a
third party tool that would so. Therefore, I assumed you were describing a
manual process, otherwise why would you mention it?

In any case, I now infer from your latest response that you believe that if
someone does not have the ability to create their own script or code to
accomplish task, then they should not bother with solving rpoblems and
instead just stick to manual, time consuming procedure. I don't know why you
are opposed to the idea of purchasing tools from a third party to accomplish
a task but that's what I want. So I guess we'll just have to agree to
disagree.

For example, if someone has a script that would automatically convert my
FrameMaker files into MIFs, merge changes from other writers, and then
commit them to the repository, then that could be promising. Though, I'd
also, want the ability to check out the mif files and use the script to
convert them into Framemaker files (I manage over 30 books and 2,000 pages
of documentation mostly by myself).

I am also not sure how SVN blame and diffing would work with MIF files. I
tried it before with tortoise svn and while it did diff the mif files, it
failed to display human readable text.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini




On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 1:06 PM, Steve Johnson  wrote:

> So don't do that? You're saying that multiple writers work on the same
> files and don't talk to each other? Given that, you will never get
> anything to work properly.
>
> A group of 20 writers checked in and out MIFs successfully for two
> years or more. It is not a negative impact to anything if you do it
> right. All you need is a way to script from FM > MIF > FM. Plus, SVN
> most likely stores the diffs only so you're saving a lot of space in
> the repository by not checking in binary FM files.
>
> If you can't script it then don't do it.
>
> On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Joseph Lorenzini
>  wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Based on the responses that I have gotten, I realized I was not being
> very
> > clear about what I asking for. All version control systems have the same
> > problem: how can someone view and edit the same data but prevent the
> users
> > from overwriting each others changes. This is especially problematic when
> > two or more users edits the same file at the same time. Depending who
> > commits to the repository first, the other person's changes could be lost
> or
> > overwritten.
> >
> > As far I know there are two models for handling this in tortoise svn:
> > Lock-Modify-Unlock and Copy-Modify-Merge. The Lock model is basically
> like a
> > network share, where the user checks out a file (locks it), which
> prevents
> > anyone else from editing that file until the user who checked out saves
> and
> > closes the file (or in this case commits the changes into the
> repository).
> > The Copy model means each user has a local copy of the same file, each
> > person makes their changes, and then commit those changes to the
> repository.
> > The SVN client would then be responsible for automatically merging the
> two
> > different versions into one final version and committing that version
> > (including changes from all users) into the repository.
> >
> > I want to use the Copy-Modify-Merge model in framemaker but I can't
> because
> > there's no utility that will automatically track the deltas in different
> > local copies and then merge the changes automatically. If I had this, I'd
> > have a system that
> >
> > attempts t

SVN Diffs in FrameMaker

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,


I have placed my FrameMaker documentation in a subversion repository.  I use
tortoise svn for my SVN client. Its working great. The one major draw back
is the inability to do binary diffs -- or so I thought. According to my sys
admin, SVN always does binary diffs but relies on the client to figure out
whats different and how to merge it.  TortoiseSVN has a dialog box where you
can tell it to use external diff program for different file types.  If any
diff programs exist for FrameMaker, I might be able to plug it in and use
it.  There are example scripts that do it for Word documents using Word’s
built in doffing functionality.


So what say you all? Does such a thing exist? Please note that in this case,
if a custom solution could be developed, I would definitely consider
purchasing it.


Sincerely,

Joseph Lorenzini
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SVN Diffs in FrameMaker

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,


I have placed my FrameMaker documentation in a subversion repository.  I use
tortoise svn for my SVN client. Its working great. The one major draw back
is the inability to do binary diffs -- or so I thought. According to my sys
admin, SVN always does binary diffs but relies on the client to figure out
whats different and how to merge it.  TortoiseSVN has a dialog box where you
can tell it to use external diff program for different file types.  If any
diff programs exist for FrameMaker, I might be able to plug it in and use
it.  There are example scripts that do it for Word documents using Word?s
built in doffing functionality.


So what say you all? Does such a thing exist? Please note that in this case,
if a custom solution could be developed, I would definitely consider
purchasing it.


Sincerely,

Joseph Lorenzini

Installing TCS 2.0 in Windows 7, 64-bit

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I thought this question had been answered but I didn't see anything in the
framemaker archives. Beginning of next year, my company is going to force me
to upgrade from Win XP Professional, SP3, 32-bit to Win 7, 64-bit. Has
anyone installed the Technical Communication Suite 2.0 (including FrameMaker
and Robohelp) into win 7, 64-bit system? If so, did you experience any
problems? I know FrameMaker 7 and Robohelp 8 are both individually supported
on Win 7 but I am concerned about the integration features. I generate help
systems by link FrameMaker books into Robohelp. I am wondering if that will
be affected.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini
___


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Installing TCS 2.0 in Windows 7, 64-bit

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I thought this question had been answered but I didn't see anything in the
framemaker archives. Beginning of next year, my company is going to force me
to upgrade from Win XP Professional, SP3, 32-bit to Win 7, 64-bit. Has
anyone installed the Technical Communication Suite 2.0 (including FrameMaker
and Robohelp) into win 7, 64-bit system? If so, did you experience any
problems? I know FrameMaker 7 and Robohelp 8 are both individually supported
on Win 7 but I am concerned about the integration features. I generate help
systems by link FrameMaker books into Robohelp. I am wondering if that will
be affected.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini

Preparing to Subversion FrameMaker Files

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

Currently, I store and work on all my framemaker books on a network share. I
am using unstructured framemaker. This is a drag for a variety of reasons.
The number one reason, of course, is the network latency. For a very long
time now, I have desperately wanted to set up a subversion repository. I
have not done this because of storage concerns; since framemaker files are
binary, a commit would not commit the difference it would commit an entirely
new version of the file. Until I had the ability to only commit the
differences instead of the whole file to a subversion repository, i didn't
think it was worth trying.

While it looks like that day is finally here. The IT admin explained that
subversion control has gotten good enough that while it can't tell you line
by line what has changed, it will only commit the differences instead of the
whole file. I have done some preliminary testing and everything seems to be
working. I plan to use tortoise svn (its free yay!).

Before I make the jump though, I wanted to know if there were any framemaker
specific pitfalls i needed to watch out for when I set up the subversioning.
I do know that merging doesn't work so having multiple people work on the
same file is a no go but that just means the tech writers (there are two of
us) will have to use svn locks on the files we are currently working on.

Sincerely,
Joseph Lorenzini

plugin for tracking text insets

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have a master book that contains all the other books in my doc set I am
looking for a plugin to generate the following info:

1. identify all the text insets in every book. Generate a count of all the
insets.
2. create a list of insets, for each inset identify which book and FM file
the inset is in. Also provide the file path to the inset.
3. ability to screen out insets i don't want to see
4. ability to screen out duplicates. ie if inset1 pops up in the book the
multiple times, i might only want to see it first the time.
5. ability to do 1-4 with conditional build expressions (minus providing the
file path.)
6. ability to do this with graphics.

Is there a plugin out there that does this? I am not interested in
framescript though. I just want to take a file, drop it into my plugin
folder, and start using it. Basically, I am looking for some robust
reporting capabilities that gives me an idea about what state my
documentation is in.

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini
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plugin for tracking text insets

[Joseph Lorenzini]

Hi all,

I have a master book that contains all the other books in my doc set I am
looking for a plugin to generate the following info:

1. identify all the text insets in every book. Generate a count of all the
insets.
2. create a list of insets, for each inset identify which book and FM file
the inset is in. Also provide the file path to the inset.
3. ability to screen out insets i don't want to see
4. ability to screen out duplicates. ie if "inset1" pops up in the book the
multiple times, i might only want to see it first the time.
5. ability to do 1-4 with conditional build expressions (minus providing the
file path.)
6. ability to do this with graphics.

Is there a plugin out there that does this? I am not interested in
framescript though. I just want to take a file, drop it into my plugin
folder, and start using it. Basically, I am looking for some robust
reporting capabilities that gives me an idea about what state my
documentation is in.

Thanks,
Joseph Lorenzini