Re: Very very old FrameMaker files: file extent

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:21 -0500 10/1/15, Alan Houser wrote:

I have seen FM files with a .doc extension, as recently as FM 7 (although 
those files may have been migrated from older versions).

So ... not an accident or fluke.

Thanks Alan.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Customizing anchored frames in FM12 (unstructured)

[Steve Rickaby]

At 16:15 +0100 9/1/15, Heiko Haida wrote:

How about using the new background color feature or the para box feature 
instead of underlining? This may look well with a 10% black e.g.
Or you could use a frame below pgf, but the resulting line would always have 
a fixed length (like with footnotes).

I made extensive use of this feature to implement a complex design in 
structurered FrameMaker. The line length can be customized on the relevant 
reference page, but, as Heiko says, will always be fixed.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Customizing anchored frames in FM12 (unstructured)

[Steve Rickaby]

At 08:18 -0500 9/1/15, tom.beiswen...@emhartglass.com wrote:

I have 2 problems.

1) I would like to have a thin border around all graphic frames, but can't 
find anything within the FM help menus that tells me how to do this.

If you mean what I think you mean, just select the frame and use the graphics 
palette to change the line style to what you want.

2) I want to have the figure capture underlined; however, when I choose 
underline in the paragraph designer (not numeric), the line is too close to 
the descenders in words containing g, y, p, etc. Is there a way to adjust the 
position of the underline so that it is just below a character's descender?

Can't help there: I don't know of a way to do this, but someone else might.

-- 
Steve
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Re: online FrameMaker 12 Documentation totally revamped; in PDF and HTML5

[Steve Rickaby]

I have not looked at the content yet, but Adobe documentation should be an 
exemplar, and IMHO a four-level TOC is not.
-- 
Steve
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Re: What is the situation with regards to buying used versions of FrameMaker?

[Steve Rickaby]

FWIW, I 'upgraded' from FrameMaker 6 to FrameMaker 7 for Mac years ago using a 
new unregistered upgrade copy obtained from eBay. It never gave me any problems.

But I see that the title of this thread is 'used copies', and I guess that 
point has been well answered already.

-- 
Steve
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Re: framers Digest, Vol 109, Issue 21

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:27 -0800 28/11/14, Phillip Norman wrote:
I can readily draw and dimension objects in FrameMaker. Why would one use AI?

Far better graphics? ;-)

-- 
Steve
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Re: seeking an elegant solution, somewhat OT

[Steve Rickaby]

At 16:33 -0500 26/11/14, John Sgammato wrote:

Seeking some creative input, or maybe a success story...
The products that I write about use a variety of open source and other 
licenses. There is a thicket of rules surrounding attribution of them. I am 
looking for a way to assemble this the first time, and then to maintain it 
after that.

John... I'm assuming that you are writing about the components, rather than 
actually using them.

This sort of thing is always a pain: it's common for photographic material. You 
don't say whether you are using structured or not. If structured, it sounds 
like an application for attributes. If not, the only solution I've ever found 
is manually using something like an Excel spreadsheet.

Sorry not to be able to report anything more creative or elegant.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Problem with playing video clips in FM 12 document viewed in Adobe Reader 11

[Steve Rickaby]

At 07:03 -0600 14/11/14, Mike Wickham wrote:

 If you have Acrobat, you should not install Reader or the PDF Creation Add-on 
 that comes with FrameMaker on that same computer.

I'm sure this is true, Mike, but it's ultra-dumb: many folks *need* Acrobat Pro 
as well as Reader and FrameMaker. Are we supposed to buy an extra computer? 
(Rhetorical question).

-- 
Steve
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Re: mouse alternative

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:42 -0500 11/11/14, Stuart Rogers wrote:

From time to time, people have mentioned problems with RSI due to mouse use. I 
just came across this device and thought I'd pass it along. I have no other 
info on it, so can't offer a review.

https://deals.inetinteractive.com/sales/feather-mouse-the-swift-browsing-experience

Looks interesting, but what on earth is 'wireless cursor experience'? ;-)

If anyone tries one of these, I'd be very interested to know how they get on 
with it.

-- 
Steve
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RE: What free Windows text editor should I use to look at MIF files?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:11 -0400 6/10/14, Fred Ridder wrote:

Sorry, Craig, but there's nothing to suggest that MIF has any basis in SGML, 
either.

Just goes to show how pioneering the original product was. Afair, its only 
competitor was Interleaf, which required one 'administrator' per six or so 
seats.

-- 
Steve [reliving bitter memories from 1993-4]
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Re: Publish fails in Frame 12

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:33 -0500 2/10/14, Theresa de Valence wrote:

Niels Grundtvig Nielsen suggested the problem might have to do with colour 
definitions and he discussed his directly modifying the MIF file which solved 
*his* problem. I've no idea *how* to modify the MIF file, so I'd rather not go 
there.

I can't help with your specific problem, but as to the above, editing MIF can 
often be a productive, if last, resort. You need a good text editor, preferably 
one which does syntax coloring. I use TextWrangler, which is free, but is also 
I think Mac-only. TextWrangler is a cut-down version of BBedit, which is the 
premier language-sensitive editor for Mac OS. I'm sure there are equivalents 
for Windows.

As for understanding the MIF, see the MIF language document that should have 
come with your FrameMaker distribution. This used to be called the 'MIF 
Reference Online Manual', but I've not checked to see if it still is. MIF is a 
text-only language that looks a bit like XML, so easy to search and edit, if a 
bit verbose.

Save as MIF, but keep the .fm file. That way you still have the source document 
if it all goes a bit pear-shaped (which FrameMaker will tell you when it 
re-parses the MIF when asked to open the edited file).

-- 
Steve
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Re: Insets and Tables: container paragraphs with no additional spacing

[Steve Rickaby]

At 12:23 -0700 2/10/14, Robert Lauriston wrote:

What is the benefit of putting a table anchor in its own paragraphs
instead of putting the anchor at the end of the preceding paragraph?

I've inherited lots of documents that do things like that and it
seemed to me like pointless busywork, but the people who set up the
templates were long gone so I couldn't ask for their rationale.

Main reason AFAIK is what happens to the text holding a table anchor when 
FrameMaker moves the table to the next page: some of the para holding the 
anchor is dragged there too, leaving excess white space at the foot of the 
preceding page.

There are many ways around this, but most of them become easier to manage if 
the table anchor lives in its own para.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Correct workflow for dealing with books within books

[Steve Rickaby]

Apurva, I see that no-one has replied to your original posting, so here are my 
thoughts to kick off the discussion...

At 19:03 +0530 25/9/14, Apurva Bahadur wrote:

I am working on a 200 page FM manual for a client. Currently, the entire 
manual is one book with several FM files with one TOC.

After review, the client suggested that the book be split into several smaller 
self contained books. For example, they wanted: Section A (Introduction), 
Section B (Features), Section C (Installation) etc. Each section should have 
its own sectional numbering (page A-1, Figure A-1, Paragraph A-1, Paragraph 
A-1.1 etc) and a TOC.

It all depends on what they mean by 'self-contained' books. I assume they mean 
that each sub-book should have its own separate TOC *within the body of the 
overall book*  - although I personally would not find this useful: people look 
for a TOC at the beginning, not multiple TOCs strewn throughout a book. Still, 
the Client is King. Alternatively, and in my view more user-friendly, would be 
one TOC at the front, subdivided to make the sub-book structure clear.

I would initially try to handle this by keeping to just one book (200 pp is a 
fairly modest size for FrameMaker), inserting part dividers and, if absolutely 
necessary, creating sub-TOCs from there. You will have to update the sub-TOCs 
manually: I've used this approach to produce chapter-level TOCs in the past. 
You could then use FrameMaker's numbering to pick up the part numbers in the 
page footers.

To create a chapter-level TOC, use the same command as for the book, but 
applied to a chapter file, then insert the TOC as an inserted file at the start 
of the chapter.

However, if this is not what your clients are thinking of, some other scheme 
will need to be followed, for example creating sub-TOCs for all chapters within 
a 'section'.

I would also try to stick to the term 'part' rather than 'section': the latter 
would confuse (me, at least), as presumably there are actual sections at a 
sub-chapter level.

Initially, I tried moving relevant files of a logical section into a new book 
and creating its own TOC. I named the volume as A, B etc. and called the 
$volnum variable in numbering of paragraph styles and page numbers. It works.
However, I run into difficulties when inserting these books with their own 
TOCs and files in the larger project book. I find that the pdf of the complete 
project does not include the individual sectional TOCs. Any suggestions of why 
that happens?

What doesn't include the sub-TOCs: the book body, the global TOC, or both? 
Which it is would govern where to look to fix the issue.

What I think we are talking about here is an 'ur-book': a book of books. I've 
only used these in the past to produce global indexes, i.e. the ur-book is 
created only to produce the index, not as an output object in its own right. 
I'm sure there are others here with more experience with ur-books than I have 
who can suggest a way to make this approach work.

The other options are to create folders or groups inside the project's book 
but I am not sure if that will achieve the desired results.

As I've only recently migrated from FrameMaker v 7, I can't help with that, as 
book-level folders are new to me..

-- 
Steve
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Re: Finding styles with a space after the name

[Steve Rickaby]

At 17:23 +0100 24/9/14, Peter Hirons wrote:

See if you can find a tool to delete unused styles - that may shorten your job.

SiliconPrairie Paragraph Tools, which Linda already has, can do this.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Structured: about containers, other matter and chapter numbering

[Steve Rickaby]

I can only hazard a guess at a fraction of this...

At 16:56 -0500 17/8/14, Theresa de Valence wrote:

In FrameBook, there will also be Front Matter and Back Matter. Can I use the 
Section element here or should I create a new element called OtherMatter?

If you are creating an EDD from scratch (as I hope you are), it is entirely up 
to you how you use elements. However, as with para tags, the function of an 
element should be consistent. So, if you are using 'Section' for body sections 
within a book, you should create a different element for front and/or 
backmatter, as these are functionally different elements, and have different 
formatting (usually) and different context rules.

It is difficult to scope your numbering queries, as it sounds as if you are 
working from a template created elsewhere. If this is the case, we do not know 
how the TOC is formed from the chapter templates. However, one way in which you 
can format a TOC consistently is to use numbered tags for the chapter titles 
for numbered chapters, and unnumbered tags for the titles of the unnumbered 
'chapters' such as Preface, Index and so on, including both tag types in the 
TOC. There are many other methods though. This doesn't really relate to 
structure.

I still don't see why you are using structure, though.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Getting a handle on structured Frame (DITA)

[Steve Rickaby]

Theresa

Going back to your original posting...

Also, my project involves converting two novellas into one ebook.

... it does not sound as if the documents you are working on are structurally 
complex. Before you give yourself a lot of pain, it might be worth revisiting 
the issue of whether you need to use structured FrameMaker at all.

As for the other issues, I'm in the same camp as Rick. When I started with 
structure, I was faced with two issues:

1. A complex book design that had been produced by a design agency with no 
thought to structure or indeed of FrameMaker.

2. A group of authors who *demanded* structured, for reasons of reuse leverage.

so I had no choice.

I will send you a further article off-list that describes how I went about it.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Getting a handle on structured Frame

[Steve Rickaby]

Hi Theresa

As others have said, it doesn't have to be structured to become an eBook.

As an aside, be aware that ePub processes can make a mess of your formatting, 
whether you are using structure or not: imho they are a work in progress. I 
know this for a fact, having seen the mess that the ePub processes can make of 
a nicely formatted print/PDF book - in my case, textbooks.

However, if you *do* decide to tackle the structured learning curve, I found 
the same problems with the structured documentation as you have when I started 
with structured FrameMaker. Partially as a result, I wrote a series of articles 
for the ISTC as a beginner's guide. If you would like a copy, let me know.

Structured is a head-banger when you're new to it, but it doesn't have to be 
complex, and it can be rewarding. I'd guess that starting from DocBook is not 
the best plan for you, especially if your books aren't structurally complex. 
DocBook was designed as a one-size-fits-all solution, and as a result the EDD 
contains zillions of elements, most of which you would not need.

Your first steps are probably:

. Do a thorough analysis of the structure you will need. You can think of this 
in terms of para styles to start out with, which will then be encapsulated in 
elements if you decide on structure.

. Decide whether structure will help you. Factors here are the amount of 
automation (not automation as in scripting, but the rules that structure 
offers) that would help helpful, and other factors such as the usefulness of 
XML - FrameMaker exchange.

. Decide on whether to create your own EDD or modify an existing one. See my 
comments above on DocBook.

Let me know if you'd like a copy of my beginner's guide. At the very least it 
will give you an idea of the complexity of structure and whether it's 
worthwhile for you.

-- 
Steve Rickaby   http://www.wordmongers.com
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Re: Getting a handle on structured Frame

[Steve Rickaby]

BTW...

At 11:08 -0500 12/8/14, Theresa de Valence wrote:

I now have ~50 files which are components of my unstructured book file. How 
would you recommend that I take the contents of those 50 files and move them 
into the structured book?

It doesn't work quite like that: you can't just move from unstructured to 
structured by importing files. There is a process involved, which requires an 
EDD and wrapping tables.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Getting a handle on structured Frame

[Steve Rickaby]

At 13:28 -0500 12/8/14, Theresa de Valence wrote:

On 8/12/2014 12:57 PM, Steve Rickaby wrote:
Let me know if you'd like a copy of my beginner's guide. At the very
least it will give you an idea of the complexity of structure and
whether it's worthwhile for you.

Steve, you can't imagine how many times I have read through those articles!

Ah. Then they have failed :-(

-- 
Steve
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Re: Interface issues with Frame 12 in Parallels: SOLVED

[Steve Rickaby]

I previously wrote...

 2. In a Parallels install of v 12 under Win7, online help is completely 
 unusable: everything appears in a single column even if the dialog is 
 widened.

Base machine is a Mac Pro running Mavericks.

Any chance of your team picking this up, Vikram? All graphics are distorted, 
all contents skewed off to the left. If the help window is widened, all text 
collapses into a narrow column about one word wide.

This was due to the default Win7 install using IE 8. Upgrading to IE 9 fixed 
the issue

For some reason, although M$ strongly suggested I should upgrade to IE 11, it 
would not install on 64-bit Win7. I haven't pursued this yet.

Many thanks to Vikas and the TCS Gold team for excellent support over this 
issue.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Interface issues with Frame 12 in Parallels

[Steve Rickaby]

I am newly experiencing the joys of v 12 in Parallels, moving from v 7 on Mac 
(irony intentional).
...
2. In a Parallels install of v 12 under Win7, online help is completely 
unusable: everything appears in a single column even if the dialog is widened.

Base machine is a Mac Pro running Mavericks.

Any chance of your team picking this up, Vikram? All graphics are distorted, 
all contents skewed off to the left. If the help window is widened, all text 
collapses into a narrow column about one word wide.

-- 
Steve Rickaby BSc MBCS CITP MISTC  http://www.linkedin.com/in/steverickaby

WordMongers Ltdhttp://www.wordmongers.com
Reg office Larks Cottage, Treen, St Levan, Penzance TR19 6LG
Registered in the UK, no. 3130681, VAT reg no GB 557 4598 91
Telephone: 01 736 810575
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Interface issues with Frame 12 in Parallels

[Steve Rickaby]

I am newly experiencing the joys of v 12 in Parallels, moving from v 7 on Mac 
(irony intentional).

1. I am left-handed, and prefer dialogs/pods on the left. Is there any way to 
enforce this without the document being covered by pods? I am asking this 
question here because of item 2.

2. In a Parallels install of v 12 under Win7, online help is completely 
unusable: everything appears in a single column even if the dialog is widened.

Base machine is a Mac Pro running Mavericks.

Any help welcomed.
-- 
Steve 
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Re: Problems with documents imported from Word

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:15 -0500 29/7/14, Theresa de Valence wrote:

What do I do to clean up files which originate in Word or PDF. I'm turning 
crime fiction novels into ebooks and have run into a few problems.

Well, Word is a crime, and mostly fiction, that's for sure ;-)

Case 1:
I import simple Word files into Frame then publish as epub or mobi. In the 
finished version there are strange display behaviours in the middle of the 
book (font size and weight and italic drastically change, then return to 
normal).

Is there a way I can clean files before I begin preparing them for 
publishing?

Others may well have additional advice to add, but here are some procedures 
that I use:

. If at all possible and cost-effective, tag the Word sources so that the tags 
match those you will use in Frame. (However, from your description, I doubt 
whether styles have been used in Word.)

. Always 'maggy' a Word document before importing it. If you're not familiar 
with 'maggying', it involves copying the entire Word source (in Word) *except* 
the final pilcrow into a new, clean Word document, then using that for the 
import. I'm informed that Word 'stores' all sorts of gunk in the final pilcrow 
of a document that is best removed.

With Word there will always be some manual clean-up, but the above may help to 
minimise it.

Case 2:

...is outside my experience, I'm afraid.

I never work in Word to do any work, except when I am copyediting a nearly 
complete document (using Track Changes). Advice please?

Never working in Word is about as good advice as there is ;-)

-- 
Steve
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Re: Mif2Go, DITA2Go, uDoc2Go: now open source

[Steve Rickaby]

At 11:08 -0700 26/7/14, Carolyn Stallard wrote:

Omni Systems is closed.  As Jeremy Griffith wished, source code will be made 
available for all three software tools.  Scott Prentice has very kindly agreed 
to set up projects for this purpose on SourceForge.

This is all very heart-warming: it's not often that Things Are As They Should 
Be, especially after such a sad event.

And thanks to Scott for taking this mantle on.

-- 
Steve [moving to Frame on Windows and looking forward to using Mif2Go]
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FM 12 in Parallels using Win7

[Steve Rickaby]

I had a quick search but couldn't see that this issue has been discussed 
recently.

I'm in the process of upgrading to FM 12 using Win7 in Parallels on a Mac Pro. 
My question is simple: which is best, 32-bit Win7 or 64-bit Win7?

-- 
Steve
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Re: FM 12 in Parallels using Win7

[Steve Rickaby]

At 07:16 -0700 13/7/14, Scott Prentice wrote:

Go with 64-bit. I know of no reason to use 32. FM 12 runs fine for me in 64.

Thanks Scott. Coming from you, I guess this advice counts as 'certified' ;-)

-- 
Steve
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Re: FM 12 in Parallels using Win7

[Steve Rickaby]

At 15:53 -0400 13/7/14, Alan Houser wrote:

One warning siren re: Parallels ... you will likely experience a FrameMaker 
crash when horizontally scrolling an unsaved file. I've learned Don't do 
that, but it's still sometimes frustrating. The issue has recently come to 
Adobe's attention here on the list, so perhaps they will issue a patch.

My colleagues who use VMware apparently do not encounter this issue.

Ah. Ahah.

For some reason that I've now forgotten, the very knowledgeable people at my 
local Apple Store recommended Parallels (9) over Fusion. I've had no issues 
with setting up virtual machines for Win7 (aside from Win7 itself!@) and OS X 
Snow Leopard Server. I've not tried FrameMaker yet. But I plan to evaluate 
Fusion.

Thanks: good to know.

-- 
Steve [now living in a virtual world]
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Re: FM 12 in Parallels using Win7

[Steve Rickaby]

At 14:31 -0700 13/7/14, Scott Prentice wrote:

Ah yes .. my experience with this is through Fusion, but I'm quite sure that 
the 64/32-bit question is the same for both virtualization options.

At the time I made this switch (7 years ago), Fusion was generally considered 
the better choice, and it was also the system that a couple of my clients were 
using. Since then, it seems that the preference switches from Parallels to 
Fusion as each comes out with a new release. In reality I think it's probably 
a toss-up.

I guess we're going a bit off-topic here, but this evening I tried out Fusion 
(5). At the moment I'm interested in OS X virtual machines, using Snow Leopard 
Server. I hit what looks like a major snag with Fusion: in a Fusion Snow 
Leopard VM I get offered only one display resolution (tiny screen), as opposed 
to the zillions in a Parallels (9) SL VM. I will investigate this further when 
I get time, and see if the problem exists in a Fusion Win7 VM.

It was an evaluation version of Fusion: maybe they cripple it.

-- 
Steve
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Re: FM12: Quirks in Find/replace using RegEx (Perl)

[Steve Rickaby]

Klaus and others

I admit that I have not been following this thread too closely, although I've 
had similar issues with EOLs in FrameMaker in the past.

However, where regexp work is concerned, there is an alternative, which might 
be practical if what's required is a batch on-off cleanup: work on the MIF and 
parse it with a stream editor. Users of FrameMaker on Unix and Mac have access 
to apps like sed: you would have to grok a bit of MIF grammar, but it offers a 
completely different approach to FrameMaker's native regexp find/replace.

Of course, you'd have to learn regexps all over again for sed :-(

-- 
Steve
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Re: Conditional cells in a straddled table row

[Steve Rickaby]

At 15:51 +0100 30/6/14, Samantha Nair wrote:

In reality, this is a large table and I have this scenario repeated at various 
points, so I would like to avoid changing the layout where possible, but am 
resigned to the fact that I may have to.

It sounds like a nightmare. If only have one condition applies to the table 
(and if no-one suggests some appropriate magic), would it work for you to 
maintain two versions of the entire table, conditionalised as appropriate?

Clearly if multiple conditions apply to the table(s), this workaround would 
become unwieldy.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Frame crash on Windows under parallels

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:57 -0400 24/6/14, Art Campbell wrote:

But you guys are complaining about buggy behavior in an operating environment, 
an emulator, that is not supported by Adobe.

I'm sure this is true, Art, but I'm also fairly sure that it's an operating 
environment that Adobe would nevertheless wish to ensure was a bug-free as 
possible, as the Mac market is considerable.

To be pedantic, Parallels is not an emulator, it's a virtualizer, i.e. it 
leverages the chip-level support for virtual machines on Intel processors: 
Windows apps should see a 'perfect' Windows machine. Or so I have been lead to 
believe, although my grasp of such exotica is shaky these days.

-- 
Steve [about to embark on Parallels, somewhat nervously...]
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Re: Jeremy Griffith has left us

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:56 -0400 7/6/14, John Sgammato wrote:

Mif2go creator Jeremy Griffith died on May 15th after a long illness.

This is sad news indeed. If anyone is able to pass on our deepest sympathies to 
his family, I'm sure we'd all be grateful for that, as we all are for all his 
hard work, dedication and patience, and his thoughtful and helpful 
contributions to this group.

-- 
Steve
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RE: FrameMaker 12 Cloud

[Steve Rickaby]

With all respect to Maxwell, special offers do not answer Rick's point. Adobe 
has generated *massive* ill-will over its licensing policies; I only hope this 
this is reflected in some substantive way, such as the stock price, that will 
cause it to rethink.

Incidentally, if a major release comes out (e.g. FrameMaker 13) during your 
subscription, you are automatically upgraded at no extra cost.

This is often touted as an advantage of cloud-based services, but is in fact a 
Really Bad Thing, as it can invalidate an organization's substantial investment 
in training and expertise by changing user interfaces and capabilities without 
warning - not to mention, er..., causing disruption to productivity (modesty 
forbids me from putting this more strongly, although I'd like to).

Just my 10c.

-- 
Steve Rickaby BSc MBCS CITP MISTC  http://www.linkedin.com/in/steverickaby

WordMongers Ltdhttp://www.wordmongers.com
[FrameMaker user and evangelist since 1993]
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RE: making stuff unconditional in FM12

[Steve Rickaby]

At 17:21 +1200 9/4/14, rebecca officer wrote:

Second, Kapil Verma, the FM product manager, emailed me off-list to discuss 
the functionality, and let me know they'll be adding a button in the 
conditional text pod to make stuff unconditional. He also explained why the 
checkboxes behave like they do, and suggested an improvement.
 
I'm very impressed at that level of response to my whinge - thanks, Adobe!

I know it's not the done thing to post 'me too!' messages, but it is indeed 
very gratifying to know that the development team monitor and respond to this 
group.

-- 
Steve [eyeing his as yet untried copy of FM 12 with wariness...]
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RE: making stuff unconditional in FM12

[Steve Rickaby]

At 23:08 + 29/3/14, Zimmerman, Gary wrote:

Sorry to rant.  I LIKE FM.  I'm just so sorry they messed with the GUI and 
messed up so badly with 9 and onwards.  They may fix it to be decent again 
incrementally, but like Windows 8, they should have scrapped the whole thing 
when they realized what a horrible blunder they made instead of turning a deaf 
ear and insisting everything was great for so long, when real users knew it 
wasn't so.  Credibility gone.  Maybe 11 is better, maybe 12 even better.  
Don't know if I'll ever get to try them.

As someone who is about to make the transition from 7 on Mac to 10, or possibly 
12, I find this very depressing. I have never had any gripes - or maybe only a 
few trivial ones - with the GUI in 7. Its shortcut keyset is programmed into my 
fingers, to the extent that I get annoyed when other apps don't respond to them 
- or, worse, do something completely different ;-) I am not looking forward to 
FrameMaker for Windows.

As for Rebecca's original gripe, in 7 I'd go the right-click and Copy Special 
route by default, but I guess it must be really irritating if the relevant bit 
of the GUI doesn't appear.

In another part of the Universe, I've seen a Word Ninja program totally around 
the interface using a combination of VB macros and GUI customization: maybe 
programming around the FrameMaker 10/12 interface is a useful approach? Can 
this sort of thing be done with scripting? A question for Rick, I guess...

Onwards and upwards... or possibly not.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Annotating text in a cross-ref in a PDF

[Steve Rickaby]

At 13:29 -0600 27/3/14, Carol J. Elkins wrote:

I'm generating PDFs out of Frame 11 and opening them in Acrobat 11 Pro in a 
Windows environment. I've discovered that the text in cross-references created 
in Framemaker cannot be annotated in Acrobat using the Strikethrough Text tool 
or the Insert Text at Cursor tool, and probably other tools as well. Because 
the text is a cross-reference, the user sees a hand cursor rather than a 
cross-hair or I-beam and is thus unable to annotate the text.

I've tried various combinations of holding the Control, Shift, and Alt keys 
down, but the hand cursor persists. Does anyone know a trick to force Acrobat 
to ignore the fact that text is a cross-reference and allow users to annotate 
the text?

In such circumstances I've resorted to the pen tool, and ringed the offending 
item. Such annotations can still carry a text field.

HTH
-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]
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Re: Not black

[Steve Rickaby]

At 20:40 + 22/3/14, Steve Rickaby wrote:

At 13:26 -0700 22/3/14, Matt Sullivan wrote:

Not directly, but if you set View - color - View to hide black that would 
make it easier to search

Neat idea: thanks...

Why is it that the weirdest things happen when you're up against a deadline?

Now here's an odd thing. I hid black throughout the book. Some chapters have 
extraneous color definitions: I don't know whether that is a factor, but...

Scanning the book with black turned off, every page was satisfactorily blank. 
However, in two chapters - actually one chapter and the index - all the text 
frames were still visible, although their contents weren't, as expected. All 
chapters shared the same template. I checked the color views and the 
definitions of 'black', and also copied the page layouts from a chapter with 
correctly invisible frames to the chapter with visible frames, but with no 
effect: the frames still stayed visible.

As the frames are set to 'no pen' anyway, this shouldn't have any effect on the 
output, but I don't like unexplained phenomena! I'm also uneasy about the 
effect of the color view setting when applied to a whole book in which 
different chapters have different sets of color definitions: I'm not sure that 
FrameMaker always gets it right.

And why would one page - only *one page* in the entire book - call for an extra 
brown spot plate just to print the crop marks, which are hard-coded to 100% C, 
100% M, 100% Y, 100% K anyway (thus messing up the preflight plate count)?

As this is a very old installation of FrameMaker, using the Apple LaserWriter 8 
Postscript driver, I don't expect solutions, I'm just airing this as a 
curiosity. I daresay other, different fun color issues await me in FrameMaker 
for Windows ;-)

-- 
Steve
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Re: Not black

[Steve Rickaby]

At 13:26 -0700 22/3/14, Matt Sullivan wrote:

Not directly, but if you set View - color - View to hide black that would make 
it easier to search

Neat idea: thanks.

Craig Johnson also suggested cutting a PDF and using Acrobat's preflighting to 
check for plate count. This also works, but is tricky to use here as, for some 
completely unfathomable reason, the Postscript driver I'm using (Mac 
Laserwriter 8) uses CMYK 'soft' black for crop marks - and even, on one 
occasion, a 'Brown' spot plate, for one page only.

Why is it that the weirdest things happen when you're up against a deadline?

-- 
Steve
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Re: TOC format that won't go away

[Steve Rickaby]

At 17:19 + 18/3/14, Thomas Scalise wrote:

 I suspect that there is a precise order of kill shots that are necessary to 
 rid me of this troublesome nitŠbut I cannot figure out what that should be. 
 Can someone put me out of my misery? Please? Thanks in advance.

The only way I can see that you could get a ContentsTitleTOC item in your TOC 
is if you've got a para tag ContentsTitle selected in the Setup Up Table of 
Contents dialog and it is in use somewhere. If you haven't, someone cleverer 
than me will have to fox it out.

If you are using a para tag ContentsTitle, where are you using it? Is it 
necessary? Also, if it's only use in the TOC, are you sure your TOC is being 
generated properly? Does your unwanted ContentsTitleTOC item have a page 
number? If so, does this give a clue?

-- 
Steve
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Re: Turkish Font Issue

[Steve Rickaby]

At 11:21 -0500 14/3/14, Alan Salo (Ariens Plant 1) wrote:

When using Adobe Distiller to print a Turkish-language file to a PDF we have 
font errors where certain characters do not distill correctly and appear as 
boxes. The fonts used in the FrameMaker file are Arial and Arial Unicode and 
they display correctly in the Frame file. We get no error messages in the 
Distiller log files.
 
Two other workstations distill the file without issue. The font set from the 
working stations has been copied to the non-working stations but does not make 
a difference.

The issue would seem to be with Distiller and not FrameMaker. Check that both 
Distiller installations (the ones that work vs the ones that don't) are looking 
at the same folders for fonts. In my elderly version of Distiller, it's 
'Settings - Font Locations...' Afaik merely copying the font set is not always 
enough: you have to tell Distiller where to look for fonts as well.

If both the working and non-working Distiller installations have the same font 
folder settings, then I'm stumped - unless you maybe have duplicated font 
files? This could happen for example with Distiller looking in say two folders 
for fonts, both of which contain a version of Arial?

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]
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Reworking legacy FrameMaker graphics

[Steve Rickaby]

I am assuming that artwork created with FrameMaker's internal graphics editor 
is a closed book, i.e. cannot be extracted and reworked in an external 
application. If anyone knows differently, or has been through this sort of 
exercise, I'd be grateful to hear about it.

My primitive tests so far (copy-paste from FrameMaker 6 source to Illustrator 
on Mac) shows confusing results. For example, objects more or less keep their 
appearance, although some geometry is lost, but cannot be ungrouped for 
editing, while fills and text seem to be destroyed, although Illustrator 
correctly reports fonts.

By the time I have to address this issue for real, I may be working in 
FrameMaker 10 or 12 for (obviously) Windows.

-- 
Steve
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Re: Reworking legacy FrameMaker graphics

[Steve Rickaby]

Many thanks to Heiko Haida for the solution here: generate PDFs of the 
graphics, which are (somewhat amazingly) then completely editable in 
Illustrator.
-- 
Steve
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Re: Reworking legacy FrameMaker graphics

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:53 -0400 11/3/14, Art Campbell wrote:
They'll work fine in Photoshop too, if you want to go that route -- I prefer 
it for charts, screen shots and so on.

I guess, although I don't use Photoshop.

  ... In my opinion, there's nothing in this world beats a '52 Vincent and a 
 redheaded girl. -- Richard Thompson

I grew up near Box Hill ;-) But sadly without a '52 Black Lightening...

-- 
Steve
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RE: Reworking legacy FrameMaker graphics

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:08 -0500 11/3/14, Craig Ede wrote:

But you wouldn't be editing screen shots, would you?

No - in this instance is it most likely to be line art originated in 
FrameMaker's graphics editor that need to be improved.

For extracting whole graphics like those, it might be better to do a saveAs 
HTML and then use the graphics from the images directory.

Ah - the old Word trick...

 Also, MIF2Go can export to FM to rtf, which allows you to save from Word to 
 HTML.

At present Mif2Go is closed to me, but I expect everyone will heave a sigh of 
relief when I finally migrate off FrameMaker 7 for Mac ;-)

 From there you can use the PNG generated in the HTML directory graphics 
 folder. For editing the graphics, this might be slightly helpful in that you 
 could then just PDF the graphic(s) needed from that directory rather than 
 navigating through the FM document to find them. 

Sure: I don't need convincing that Mif2Go is a valuable tool, from what I've 
read here over the years, and from its user guide. Also, a whole new sunny 
upland of plug-ins opens up with a FrameMaker Mac - Windows migration. Some 
slight compensation for the pain ;-)

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]
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Re: Unable to allocate ... bytes for color profile

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:19 +0200 6/3/14, Robert CH Shell wrote:

Any clues what went wrong here?

%%[ Error: limitcheck; OffendingCommand: setdistillerparams ]%%
%%[ Flushing: rest of job (to end-of-file) will be ignored ]%%
Unable to allocate 557168 bytes for color profile U.S. Web Coated (SWOP) v2
%%[ Warning: PostScript error. No PDF file produced. ] %%

I so wish there was a pre-flight check for FM. Even the despised PageMaker
had one. This error cost me 7 hours of precious computer time. Waits till end 
before error message~acronym~ WEBEM

Yes, these incomprehensible Distiller errors are irritating. The problems in my 
experience are most often related to graphics. Looks like a graphic has a bad 
color profile here: have you tried to weedle out which graphic is causing the 
issue? Does Distiller process .ps up to the point of the error? If it's a book, 
i.e. multiple documents, try to distill each separately, and see what happens. 
If not, try stubbing graphics one by one to spot any delinquents.

Unless the error is real, and you're short of physical memory?

As for preflighting, Acrobat Pro can do a lot for you. As it's now rentable, 
it's not a huge cost for a one-off preflight.

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]
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Re: Spell-checking not foolproof

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:45 +1300 5/3/14, rebecca officer wrote:

Check the character format and make sure the dictionary settings are right. If 
it's set to none it won't get checked.

At 09:17 + 5/3/14, Harro de Jong wrote:

Are you sure the paragraph or character format of that word doesn't have its 
language set to 'None'? That would prevent it from being checked.

Good point, but no, it's not set to 'none'. It's only the one word that failed 
to be checked correctly.

However, this might be part of the truth, as the word 'upwardss', if inserted 
into another chapter in the same book, is correctly flagged as wrong.

If I search for 'language = none', I get large chunks of text selected, but if 
I reselect the same text manually, the character designer dialog shows the 
correct language (US English). Huh?

This copy was originally imported from Word... :-(

-- 
Steve
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RE: Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 21:18 + 3/3/14, a...@ant-davey.com wrote:

Getting them to use a restrictive number of formats is just the first step 
towards structured authoring. The ones that really have me tearing my hair out 
are those who use Heading 1 and maybe Heading 2 and then every subhead below 
that is Normal+Bold. Those ones are NEVER going to understand the significance 
of structure.

I think the only way to tackle this sort of problem is at the corporate level. 
Customize *all* Word installations, and get approval from upstairs to lock Word 
down to the customized version.

I used to work with a Word MVP who did this for a client. One click in the 
toolbar, the user interface changed completely, and the total Word environment 
was locked to the corporate templates with all opportunities for local 
formatting removed.

On a historical note, Interleaf implemented Word round-tripping back in the 
early 90s as a cost-plus option. Seems like things have gone backwards.

-- 
Steve
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Spell-checking not foolproof

[Steve Rickaby]

A typo in the book I'm working on spelled 'upwardss'. It goes through spell 
checking just fine.

So I told FrameMaker to unlearn 'upwardss', and it said it had.

But it still didn't trigger a spelling violation.

??
-- 
Steve
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RE: Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 16:36 + 3/3/14, Harding, Dan wrote:

Anything proprietary, that requires a major learning curve, or an additional 
software purchase/install would not work well at all.

With all respect to Rebecca, in that case I would be very cautious about LaTeX. 
Yes, it's free, and yes, it works, but if you want to deviate from the designs 
dictated by existing packages (correct term?), you are then into a very big 
learning issue, requiring deep knowledge of TeX itself. LaTeX can be made to do 
amazing things in the hands of an expert, but I've yet to see a predefined 
package produce acceptable results: there's always some wrinkle the package 
developer hasn't thought of, and which you can't fix.

As a small example, I recently copy-edited a thesis done in LaTeX. The package 
designer had never considered that an author might want to embed 
non-proportional character markup, which is very common in software 
documentation, where camel-case is a convention, i.e. 'ThisIsaThing'. Such 
words are almost always non-dictionary words. In this case, if such a word fell 
at the right-hand margin of the text page, LaTeX simply didn't bother to try to 
hyphenate it, resulting in gross margin violation and the author having to 
manually break such words *in the LaTeX source*. Of course, any editing that 
resulted in text flow destroyed this, with the manually hyphenated word now 
appearing hyphenated within a line. Yech.

-- 
Steve
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RE: Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:57 -0800 3/3/14, Syed Zaeem Hosain (syed.hos...@aeris.net) wrote:

Agreed that LaTeX has a steep learning curve and, in this WYSIWYG world, it 
may seem like a step backward to some people. However, the power and 
flexibility (with highly consistent formatted output) is very appealing in 
some cases.

With regard to hyphenation, it sounds like the person writing the thesis was 
not providing hyphenation hints. You can use the \hyphenation command to 
identify the break points in a set of unusual words, and LaTeX will do the 
right thing after that whenever it sees those words.

It was just an example taken at random from recent experience. I'm sure there 
is a workaround, but the writer is a software expert and researcher, and the 
fact that he didn't know about this sort of proves my case - that getting good 
results out of LaTeX requires deep knowledge ;-) I am sure that it can be made 
to do great things, but I've never seen what I would consider acceptable 
results come out of it in the the hands of non-experts.

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]
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RE: Round-trip revisions via MS Word. Alternate methods?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:40 -0500 22/2/14, Rick Quatro wrote:

Mif2Go by Omsys is a much better way to get good Word output from
FrameMaker. They will tell you that there is no good tool for round-tripping
between Word and FrameMaker, but if you are doing it anyway, you might as
well make the Frame to Word side as good as possible. I highly recommend
Mif2Go.

Just to add to what Rick's said, there's a helpful section (6.1) in the Mif2Go 
manual, which you can download from the Omni Systems site, explaining just why 
Word doesn't play well with FrameMaker.

http://mif2go.com/download/ug

Just a thought, taking a more global view... FrameMaker 12 claims to be able to 
import PDFs with comments into the original FrameMaker source document, *even 
if it has changed*. I have no experience of how well it works (yet ;-), but you 
might want to review this new feature.

-- 
Steve
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RE: FM12 has char format in xref been fixed?

[Steve Rickaby]

Could you not fix your issue by putting all the text to be cross-referenced in 
a separate file, then importing it wherever you want it? This would give you 
single-sourcing, *and* preserve formatting.

I've tried this with a file containing character markup and a hypertext marker, 
and both are preserved, with the hypertext marker functional, in the 
destination file.

I'll send the files off-list.
-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]
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RE: FM12 has char format in xref been fixed?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 11:56 -0700 4/2/14, Carol J. Elkins wrote:

Best practice for setting up character formats is to set everything As Is 
except the feature that you want the character tag to control. That would 
include setting the Font Family to As Is. So for Emphasis, for example, the 
font family would be set to As Is and only the Angle set to Italic. This 
enables the character tag to be applied to any text, regardless of its 
paragraph usage. I can apply Emphasis to text defined as Times Roman, Arial, 
etc., and the font is retained and only the Angle changed.

This is absolutely true, but not the problem you originally reported ;-)

Referring to your original problem, in the ancient version of FrameMaker that 
I'm currently using (7), character tagging is indeed lost in xrefs. It may be 
intended behavior, or just an accidental side-effect of the power of 
FrameMaker's cross-reference formatting. As it's got xref builders that can 
themselves apply formatting, it can't honor any formatting in the source text. 
I.e, $paratext means just that - the text of the source paragraph, and only 
the text. The question would be, if FrameMaker *did* honor character formatting 
in the source of the xref, how would it combine that with formatting applied in 
the xref format definition?

I can think of some clunky workarounds, but they're just that: clunky. One 
approach is clearly to avoid character formatting of the the xref source if 
possible. If you can't, then maybe break the xref source up using inlines so 
that you can 'restore' the required formatting in the xref format by building 
the xref in bits with the formatting you want? I.e. the source text would be 
something like 
ParaWithTextasInlineACharFormattedBitasInlineParaWithTextasInlineA, and 
your xref format(s) would be something like $paratext (to part A)Emphasis 
(for char formatted bit$paratext (to part B). But then all xrefs would 
actually be three xrefs, tripling your workload and adding maintenance issues.

How you got about it all depends on the context. I would guess from your 
original post that you want to use $paratext and get the text *and* any 
character formatting applied to it. But FrameMaker doesn't work like that: you 
can't 'recover' character formatting from an xref source's text.

I don't know about maker.ini fixes, as FrameMaker 7 for Mac doesn't use 
maker.ini.

If all the above is nonsense, or completely off-base, I apologize: I'm trying 
to think in the midst of a gale that's trying to take the roof off.

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]
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RE: FM12 has char format in xref been fixed?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 14:08 -0600 4/2/14, Craig Ede wrote:
The essence of the workaround that was described is based on the fact that 
font family changes are respected in xrefs (try formatting part of a line with 
WingDings, for instance). Thus the kludge that allows you to define a family 
that incorporates formatting like bold, or italics, or blue, or whatever by 
simply making it look like a different font family. (Disclaimer: I have never 
done this.)

Ah... clever.

There are good arguments (as the one you make) for ignoring such formatting as 
bold, ital and the like in an xref, but ignoring a ZapfDingbat or symbol font 
char format could be disastrous. Imagine a mu becoming an m within an xref. 
So FrameMaker is designed not to ignore that. The wonderful thing is that you 
can use that feature to accomplish (albeit with a bit of work) what is 
desired by the original poster.

Never a day goes past without my learning something new about FrameMaker, even 
after more than 20 years of using it. Makes life interesting, I guess ;-)

-- 
Steve
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Using a character format for only some pages in an index

[Steve Rickaby]

Could someone remind me how to do this, or even whether it's possible in Frame? 
I've looked in the manual, but can't find the information.

What I need to do is get Frame to apply a boldface font to some page numbers, 
but not all, for an index entry. To illustrate...

T

Thing  2, 7, 23, *bold*40-55*default*, 77, 89

U

Uber thing 12, 24... (etc.)

I'm sure I've done this is the past, but maybe I'm just imagining it.
 
-- 
Steve
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RE: Using a character format for only some pages in an index

[Steve Rickaby]

At 17:21 + 31/1/14, Bain, Thomas wrote:

You almost have it. In the index marker, use Bold, assuming you have a 
character tag named Bold set to what you want for emphasis. For example: First 
Aid:SituationsBold. This will only apply to the page number for this 
particular entry.

Ah.. right: character tag for page number goes last in entry, right?

I've got some character tags in the markers, thus:

[Marker] chartagentrydefault para font

...for the entries, as I want some of them formatted specially. If I read you 
right, this should change to:

[Marker] chartagentrybold

or...

[Marker] chartagentrydefault para fontbold

if I just want a page number in bold?

-- 
Steve
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RE: Using a character format for only some pages in an index

[Steve Rickaby]

At 17:41 + 31/1/14, Bain, Thomas wrote:

Yes, the bold goes last in the index marker. Both of your last two examples 
are correct.

Many thanks, Thomas. I do indexing about once in eighteen months, and that 
seems to be just long enough to forget these sorts of tricks.

-- 
Steve
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Windows versions for FrameMaker 10

[Steve Rickaby]

Tammy's posting has reminded me of a question I meant to ask, but I guess she's 
answered it by default (i.e. FrameMaker 10 works on Windows 7 64-bit).

As I will be moving to FrameMaker 10 (or 12) for Windows this year, using 
Windows under virtualization on Mac OS X, does it matter whether you use 32-bit 
Windows (7) or 64-bit? 

I notice that the system requirements on the Adobe site here:

http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/framemaker/systemreqs.html

don't seem to say.
-- 
Steve
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RE: End-of-flow wildcard? [footnote to the Word/Frame/ligature story]

[Steve Rickaby]

In e-mails from the authors, read here as pure text, ligatures such as 'fi' and 
'fl' appear as 'I dunno' characters: blank squares. When pasted into 
FrameMaker, the ligatures render correctly. However, FrameMaker puts a word 
break around them: for example, double-clicking on 'flow' highlights just the 
'ow' part.

Running a global find/replace on 'fl' and 'fi' and replacing them with 
themselves, i.e. 'f' and 'l' or 'f'' and 'i' typed into the Replace box, fixes 
the issue: FrameMaker can find the ligatures and correctly replace them with 
the relevant two-character pair.

Weird...
-- 
Steve
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RE: End-of-flow wildcard? [footnote to the Word/Frame/ligature story]

[Steve Rickaby]

At 12:39 + 27/1/14, Steve Rickaby wrote:

Running a global find/replace on 'fl' and 'fi' and replacing them with 
themselves, i.e. 'f' and 'l' or 'f'' and 'i' typed into the Replace box, fixes 
the issue: FrameMaker can find the ligatures and correctly replace them with 
the relevant two-character pair.

I lied: FrameMaker can't find the 'fl' if it is a ligature and 'f' 'l' are 
typed into the Find dialog.

However - and this is weirder - I have had both 'fl' as a ligature and 'fl' as 
separate characters *in the same paragraph* of an e-mail from the authors. 
(That was what caused my erroneous posting.)

I guess this is getting off the point, though, so I'll keep mum about it from 
now on.

-- 
Steve
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RE: FrameMaker freaks me out

[Steve Rickaby]

At 16:11 + 23/1/14, Reng, Dr. Winfried wrote:

Fortunately I never experienced something like this.
What I would do immediately before closing files or
FrameMaker: Copy the whole folder to a temp folder.
If FrameMaker does not work correctly, it could also
damage the files when closing.

Good plan. Too late now ;-) But fortunately it was all ok.

-- 
Steve
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RE: Now OT, I suppose. RE: Adobe pricing policies (was: FrameMaker 12 released)

[Steve Rickaby]

At 11:28 -0800 22/1/14, Syed Zaeem Hosain (syed.hos...@aeris.net) wrote:

The unhappy ones are probably the small users - like myself - who helped 
FrameMaker become what it is and Adobe *clearly* does not care about us 
anymore. That is unlike the founders of Frame Technology who I met many years 
ago ... and the founders of Adobe too, I would hope!

Indeed: I suspect that the many small users such as myself (one seat since 
1993) who have happily evangelized for FrameMaker, not through affection for 
Adobe, but simply because the tool is so damn *good*, do feel we are being 
shouldered out. FrameMaker has been the cornerstone of my professional life: I 
use InDesign, Acrobat, DreamWeaver and Illustrator too, but it would all have 
been impossible without FrameMaker, and over thirty published textbooks bear 
that out.

Surely one of the key principles of running a successful company is keeping 
faith with its customers, no matter how small?

-- 
Steve [the one wearing the 'FrameMaker for OS X' T-shirt at IPEX 2006]
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Re: Subject: RE: OT: Adobe Acrobat Pro and Adobe Reader on same client

[Steve Rickaby]

At 06:05 -0600 23/1/14, Davis, David wrote:

If you have Windows 8, it comes with Microsoft HyperV built in, you can 
create a virtual machine with a few clicks, install Reader in it, and play 
away to your hearts content.  (Shock news: Windows 8 actually does have some 
useful new features in it, see?  :) )

Shock indeed. And for those working on Mac under Parallels or Fusion, virtual 
machines are a doddle (or so I'm told, and looking forward to finding out).

-- 
Steve
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FrameMaker freaks me out

[Steve Rickaby]

At some point while editing yesterday, and I'm not sure what I was doing, 
*every chapter* in the book I'm working on started displaying all its text as 
if someone had picked it up and randomly scattered it across the page - 
complete loss of vertical leading, and sideways shifts as well. It was clearly 
something internal to FrameMaker's display engine, as opening unopened chapters 
showed the same thing.

After nearly having a coronary, I closed down FrameMaker and then re--opened 
the book, and everything then looked fine, and has remained fine.

I've never seen anything like this before, and it's probably shortened my life 
expectancy somewhat. Anyone else experienced this?

[FrameMaker 7.0p577 for Mac]
-- 
Steve
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Re: FrameMaker freaks me out

[Steve Rickaby]

At 11:10 -0500 23/1/14, John Sgammato wrote:

I've seen it once or twice in the past 20 years - closing and restarting FM 
worked.

Then our statistics match, John - for me, once in 21 years ;-)

I attribute it to sunspots.

Or in my case, possible cat fur.

-- 
Steve
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Re: FrameMaker freaks me out

[Steve Rickaby]

At 08:16 -0800 23/1/14, David Spreadbury wrote:

Occasionally my FrameMaker display will go a little berserk. Nothing as 
serious, so far, as you relate, but similar. Also, there are times when I will 
delete a graphic, but it remains on the screen, and I know I deleted it. It 
may be due to a long standing bug in Frame related to refreshing of the 
display. You might try Ctrl+L (Refresh) one time and see if it has any effect.

Yep, the refresh bug: I do ctrl-L a lot. But this was something else altogether.

Or, check if there are any updates to your video drivers. Another possibility.

I'm on Mac: I don't think we have those ;-)

-- 
Steve
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RE: FrameMaker freaks me out

[Steve Rickaby]

At 10:42 -0800 23/1/14, Syed Zaeem Hosain (syed.hos...@aeris.net) wrote:

Since then, I have relied on two things:

DropBox is my friend ;-)

-- 
Steve
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Re: Now OT, I suppose. RE: Adobe pricing policies (was: FrameMaker 12 released)

[Steve Rickaby]

At 07:49 -0800 22/1/14, Syed Zaeem Hosain (syed.hos...@aeris.net) wrote:

Financial success by large companies is not the only measure of success that 
matters. It is why in my 35+ years of work, I have chosen to do many small 
startups and try to only work for small companies. My current startup (I was 
one of the founders) now has 80 employees and I bet that, *collectively*, we 
are a happier bunch of people than all the folks at Adobe. But we will *never* 
make those top lists due to our tiny size! :)

I forgot the precise statistic, but I believe that something like 70% of the UK 
economy is made up of companies with ten employees or less (and no, that 
doesn't mean we're just a nation of shopkeepers ;-)

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]
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Now OT, I suppose. RE: Adobe pricing policies (was: FrameMaker 12 released)

[Steve Rickaby]

At 07:49 -0800 22/1/14, Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain at aeris.net) wrote:

>Financial success by large companies is not the only measure of success that 
>matters. It is why in my 35+ years of work, I have chosen to do many small 
>startups and try to only work for small companies. My current startup (I was 
>one of the founders) now has 80 employees and I bet that, *collectively*, we 
>are a happier bunch of people than all the folks at Adobe. But we will *never* 
>make those top lists due to our tiny size! :)

I forgot the precise statistic, but I believe that something like 70% of the UK 
economy is made up of companies with ten employees or less (and no, that 
doesn't mean we're just a nation of shopkeepers ;-)

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]

Re: FrameMaker 12: e-publishing options

[Steve Rickaby]

At 12:55 -0800 20/1/14, Matt Sullivan wrote:

While I've not yet used the Fm12 output for ePub yet, it's very much based on 
the Fm to Rh workflow in TCS4. I expect it to work as smoothly (very smoothly) 
as when I published my book last year, and without requiring an Rh installation

**Since I already have the mapping done in Rh, however, I'll likely stick with 
that setup. To redo the setup in Fm would be extra time (perhaps 2-4 hours)

Once set up, however, it's turnkey, and only requires processing time (varies 
on content and graphics usage.

From my standpoint of complete ignorance of Robohelp, could you explain the 
apparent disconnect between 'based on the Fm to Rh workflow' and the fact that 
ePub can be done with FM 12 alone?

My interest is purely in books: I've got little or no contact with on-line 
help, and subcontracted that part of the last job involving help.

-- 
Steve
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FrameMaker 12: e-publishing options

[Steve Rickaby]

At 12:55 -0800 20/1/14, Matt Sullivan wrote:

>While I've not yet used the Fm12 output for ePub yet, it's very much based on 
>the Fm to Rh workflow in TCS4. I expect it to work as smoothly (very smoothly) 
>as when I published my book last year, and without requiring an Rh installation
>
>**Since I already have the mapping done in Rh, however, I'll likely stick with 
>that setup. To redo the setup in Fm would be extra time (perhaps 2-4 hours)
>
>Once set up, however, it's turnkey, and only requires processing time (varies 
>on content and graphics usage.

>From my standpoint of complete ignorance of Robohelp, could you explain the 
>apparent disconnect between 'based on the Fm to Rh workflow' and the fact that 
>ePub can be done with FM 12 alone?

My interest is purely in books: I've got little or no contact with on-line 
help, and subcontracted that part of the last job involving help.

-- 
Steve

RE: End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 21:25 -0500 19/1/14, Rick Quatro wrote:

The FrameMaker Word import filter leaves a line-feed character at the end of
each paragraph. You can't see it, but it is there and apparently affects
your search. I routinely strip them out in my scripts. A MIF-wash should
remove them.

Thanks Rick - very helpful (as always)

-- 
Steve
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RE: End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 18:51 -0800 19/1/14, Syed Zaeem Hosain (syed.hos...@aeris.net) wrote:

A slow process (would take me a day or two for around less than 100 page 
documents), but resulted in cleaner FM files ultimately. Also gave me a chance 
to read the document and verify what I wanted it to say and look like. :)

I always 'maggy' a Word document to get a clean copy before import, and I've 
not had too many issues. But it would be good to get the L/F characters out.

Having said 'not too many issues', this book has thrown up some new ones. The 
source is from three authors working in Word in Finland: quite a lot of 
inter-word spaces disappeared, and for some - but not all - files, all the 
ligatures ('fl', 'fi' etc) disappeared too! I've never seen this before in a 
couple of decades of inter-working between Word and FrameMaker. So 'flow' 
became 'ow', 'first' became 'rst', 'configuration' became 'conguration' and so 
on. These are the sorts of things that make an editor's life fun :-(

['Maggying', for anyone not familiar with it, consists of copying all of a Word 
document except the final pilcrow, then pasting it into a new, clean Word 
document and working with that. I believe the technique was named after its 
originator. It can solve a lot of issues with Word, as apparently the final 
pilcrow 'hides' a great deal of Word-crud.]

-- 
Steve
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FrameMaker 12: e-publishing options

[Steve Rickaby]

At 06:16 + 17/1/14, Maxwell Hoffmann wrote:

Early Reviews for #Adobe Tech Comm Suite 5 and FrameMaker 12 from TechWhirl - 
http://bit.ly/1cy87qchttp://bit.ly/1cy87qc

The thing that really caught my eye here was the ability to output to ePub and 
Kindle.

I would be *very* interested in any feedback that arises on how well this 
works. At present my clients subcontract Kindle work, at extra cost, and the 
results I've seen have been less than optimal. Were I able to offer 
e-publishing options for FrameMaker-developed books at low (or even zero) cost, 
it would justify the price of a 10-12 upgrade. The dream option would be to 
output to pre-press PDF and Kindle with zero extra work, but I expect it's more 
complex than that. (I know little or nothing about the Kindle format.)

Also, does this require the entire TCS suite, or can it be done from FrameMaker 
only?

-- 
Steve
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RE: End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 08:03 -0500 20/1/14, Fred Ridder wrote:

But in the current XML-based Word file format (.docx, .docm, .dotx, .dotm 
extensions used in Word 2007 and later) does not use the same embed 
formatting in the pilcrow technique. Instead, the single file you see is 
actually a zip archive that contains dozens of separate XML objects that 
contain all the formatting info and other metadata along with other XML 
objects for graphics and the text of the file. There is absolutely no evidence 
that Maggying has any beneficial effect on Word documents that use the Office 
XML format. It won't *hurt* anything to do it, but it won't fix anything, 
either.

Thanks for that clarification, Fred - you are of course absolutely right. As I 
still work in Word 2004, I still maggy stuff.

[I've not heard anything that leads me to believe that more recent versions of 
Word offer any substantive improvements, but my views are based on the Mac 
versions, which have always been the poor cousins of the Windows versions.)

-- 
Steve
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RE: End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 08:20 -0500 20/1/14, Fred Ridder wrote:

There are two areas of improvements in Word versions from 2007 onwards that 
probably should be of interest to you because they can have a direct effect on 
the problem you described in your previous message. Those improvements relate 
to Unicode fonts and ligatures.

Useful to know.

 The recognition and proper handling of TrueType ligatures was one of the 
 major changes in Word 2010, which I assume also trickled down to Word 2011 
 for Mac. Has your client recently upgraded from the Word 2007/2008 generation 
 to Word 2010 or later?

Hard to be sure, as Word doesn't seem to put a version stamp into its binaries 
(if they are such) denoting its version, as FrameMaker does.  No sign of a 
'docx file anywhere in the delivery. I would also assume that they worked in 
Windows.

I get all manner of stuff coming in from Word, in all manner of qualities and 
with multiple versions, but in this case I'd say probably not Word 2010+ for 
the delivery, as the book arrived as one large .doc file, which I then burst 
into chapters for import into FrameMaker. The interesting thing was that only 
some of the chapters showed the ligature issue: my hunch is that all three 
authors worked in potentially differing versions, and the lead author then 
munged the lot into one file for delivery and to produce a PDF. I guess I could 
ask, if anyone following this thread is interested.

 If their files contain ligatures done right from a more current version of 
 Word, that could explain why your copy of Word 2004 doesn't recognize them at 
 all.

Indeed, I'm sure this is the reason. The whole-book PDF doesn't show the 
ligatures issue, but this is to be expected from your suggestions. And only 
some bits showed it in the .doc import.

I am in no way trying to be critical here - in fact this book's ms was of a 
considerably higher technical standard than many I've worked with.

This also highlights an generic issue with publishers: the level of technical 
guidance for author presentation of manuscripts varies quite a bit, from 
detailed to almost non-existent. Probably the majority of Word users don't 
realise the pitfalls that it can generate. But that's a whole other issue, and 
doesn't belong here, interesting though it is ;-)

Thanks.
-- 
Steve
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RE: End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:13 -0500 20/1/14, Fred Ridder wrote:

Are either of you using Rick Quatro's TableCleaner plug-in?

Nope. All those wonderful plug-ins will become available to me when I get a box 
that will run my copy of FrameMaker 10 (trip to local Apple Store to talk to a 
guru scheduled for March).

Authors don't have any contact with FrameMaker, and I'm still using 7 for Mac. 
(And boy has it earned it's keep!)

 At my last employer about a decade ago (my, how time files when you're having 
 fun...) I converted well over 10K pages of legacy Word documentation to 
 FrameMaker and I know I could never have done it without Rick's plug-in. It 
 got rid of all sorts of Word-specific cruft and dealt with the way Frame 
 imported every Word table with the custom ruling and shading flag set so 
 that you wouldn't get the expected results when you applied a Frame table 
 style. And it did it all in a single step.

I'm sure Rick is happy to read this ;-)

Generally - and perhaps fortunately - my source material tends not to be 
table-heavy. The table that started this thread was one that I created here, as 
it's a convenient way of handling reference lists. Or would be, if FrameMaker 7 
didn't suffer from the bug that strips xref markers when you sort a table. (Has 
this gone from later versions, I wonder?)

-- 
Steve
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End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 21:25 -0500 19/1/14, Rick Quatro wrote:

>The FrameMaker Word import filter leaves a line-feed character at the end of
>each paragraph. You can't see it, but it is there and apparently affects
>your search. I routinely strip them out in my scripts. A MIF-wash should
>remove them.

Thanks Rick - very helpful (as always)

-- 
Steve

End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 18:51 -0800 19/1/14, Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain at aeris.net) wrote:

>A slow process (would take me a day or two for around less than 100 page 
>documents), but resulted in cleaner FM files ultimately. Also gave me a chance 
>to read the document and verify what I wanted it to say and look like. :)

I always 'maggy' a Word document to get a clean copy before import, and I've 
not had too many issues. But it would be good to get the L/F characters out.

Having said 'not too many issues', this book has thrown up some new ones. The 
source is from three authors working in Word in Finland: quite a lot of 
inter-word spaces disappeared, and for some - but not all - files, all the 
ligatures ('fl', 'fi' etc) disappeared too! I've never seen this before in a 
couple of decades of inter-working between Word and FrameMaker. So 'flow' 
became 'ow', 'first' became 'rst', 'configuration' became 'conguration' and so 
on. These are the sorts of things that make an editor's life fun :-(

['Maggying', for anyone not familiar with it, consists of copying all of a Word 
document except the final pilcrow, then pasting it into a new, clean Word 
document and working with that. I believe the technique was named after its 
originator. It can solve a lot of issues with Word, as apparently the final 
pilcrow 'hides' a great deal of Word-crud.]

-- 
Steve

FrameMaker 12: e-publishing options

[Steve Rickaby]

At 06:16 + 17/1/14, Maxwell Hoffmann wrote:

>Early Reviews for #Adobe Tech Comm Suite 5 and FrameMaker 12 from TechWhirl - 
>http://bit.ly/1cy87qc

The thing that really caught my eye here was the ability to output to ePub and 
Kindle.

I would be *very* interested in any feedback that arises on how well this 
works. At present my clients subcontract Kindle work, at extra cost, and the 
results I've seen have been less than optimal. Were I able to offer 
e-publishing options for FrameMaker-developed books at low (or even zero) cost, 
it would justify the price of a 10->12 upgrade. The dream option would be to 
output to pre-press PDF and Kindle with zero extra work, but I expect it's more 
complex than that. (I know little or nothing about the Kindle format.)

Also, does this require the entire TCS suite, or can it be done from FrameMaker 
only?

-- 
Steve

End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 08:03 -0500 20/1/14, Fred Ridder wrote:

>But in the current XML-based Word file format (.docx, .docm, .dotx, .dotm 
>extensions used in Word 2007 and later) does not use the same "embed 
>formatting in the pilcrow" technique. Instead, the single file you see is 
>actually a zip archive that contains dozens of separate XML objects that 
>contain all the formatting info and other metadata along with other XML 
>objects for graphics and the text of the file. There is absolutely no evidence 
>that Maggying has any beneficial effect on Word documents that use the Office 
>XML format. It won't *hurt* anything to do it, but it won't fix anything, 
>either.

Thanks for that clarification, Fred - you are of course absolutely right. As I 
still work in Word 2004, I still maggy stuff.

[I've not heard anything that leads me to believe that more recent versions of 
Word offer any substantive improvements, but my views are based on the Mac 
versions, which have always been the poor cousins of the Windows versions.)

-- 
Steve

End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 08:20 -0500 20/1/14, Fred Ridder wrote:

>There are two areas of improvements in Word versions from 2007 onwards that 
>probably should be of interest to you because they can have a direct effect on 
>the problem you described in your previous message. Those improvements relate 
>to Unicode fonts and ligatures.

Useful to know.

> The recognition and proper handling of TrueType ligatures was one of the 
> major changes in Word 2010, which I assume also trickled down to Word 2011 
> for Mac. Has your client recently upgraded from the Word 2007/2008 generation 
> to Word 2010 or later?

Hard to be sure, as Word doesn't seem to put a version stamp into its binaries 
(if they are such) denoting its version, as FrameMaker does.  No sign of a 
'docx file anywhere in the delivery. I would also assume that they worked in 
Windows.

I get all manner of stuff coming in from Word, in all manner of qualities and 
with multiple versions, but in this case I'd say probably not Word 2010+ for 
the delivery, as the book arrived as one large .doc file, which I then burst 
into chapters for import into FrameMaker. The interesting thing was that only 
some of the chapters showed the ligature issue: my hunch is that all three 
authors worked in potentially differing versions, and the lead author then 
munged the lot into one file for delivery and to produce a PDF. I guess I could 
ask, if anyone following this thread is interested.

> If their files contain "ligatures done right" from a more current version of 
> Word, that could explain why your copy of Word 2004 doesn't recognize them at 
> all.

Indeed, I'm sure this is the reason. The whole-book PDF doesn't show the 
ligatures issue, but this is to be expected from your suggestions. And only 
some bits showed it in the .doc import.

I am in no way trying to be critical here - in fact this book's ms was of a 
considerably higher technical standard than many I've worked with.

This also highlights an generic issue with publishers: the level of technical 
guidance for author presentation of manuscripts varies quite a bit, from 
detailed to almost non-existent. Probably the majority of Word users don't 
realise the pitfalls that it can generate. But that's a whole other issue, and 
doesn't belong here, interesting though it is ;-)

Thanks.
-- 
Steve

End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:13 -0500 20/1/14, Fred Ridder wrote:

>Are either of you using Rick Quatro's TableCleaner plug-in?

Nope. All those wonderful plug-ins will become available to me when I get a box 
that will run my copy of FrameMaker 10 (trip to local Apple Store to talk to a 
guru scheduled for March).

Authors don't have any contact with FrameMaker, and I'm still using 7 for Mac. 
(And boy has it earned it's keep!)

> At my last employer about a decade ago (my, how time files when you're having 
> fun...) I converted well over 10K pages of legacy Word documentation to 
> FrameMaker and I know I could never have done it without Rick's plug-in. It 
> got rid of all sorts of Word-specific cruft and dealt with the way Frame 
> imported every Word table with the "custom ruling and shading" flag set so 
> that you wouldn't get the expected results when you applied a Frame table 
> style. And it did it all in a single step.

I'm sure Rick is happy to read this ;-)

Generally - and perhaps fortunately - my source material tends not to be 
table-heavy. The table that started this thread was one that I created here, as 
it's a convenient way of handling reference lists. Or would be, if FrameMaker 7 
didn't suffer from the bug that strips xref markers when you sort a table. (Has 
this gone from later versions, I wonder?)

-- 
Steve

RE: End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 16:53 -0600 18/1/14, Craig Ede wrote:

/f, isn't it?

It may well be, but if so, this isn't implemented in my ancient version (7). 
I'll be moving to Framemaker 10 sometime this year, but not for the current job.

Just have to do it manually [sigh]. Thanks anyway though.
-- 
Steve
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RE: End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:07 -0600 19/1/14, Craig Ede wrote:

Hmmm, I know I used it for searches in that version. Let me look into it on
my old laptop.

For FM 10 it's \f. Wildcards don't have to be on.

This is getting more interesting. \f does work in FrameMaker 7, but it only 
finds some instances of the '.\f' combo I'm trying to find.

However - and it's a big 'however' - the source came from Word, and the 
instances of '.\f' that FrameMaker *is* finding are those I've typed, but not 
those that came from Word. My guess is that - for the Word-sourced material - 
what looks like a period/end of flow on screen is something else, and/or has 
some invisible Word-type-crud after the period but before the end of the flow. 
And copying them from the document to the Find field doesn't work either: 
copy/pasting the period alone works, but doesn't work when '\f' is added to the 
find string.

Probably the best way to sort this is to de-table the lot, MIF-wash it and 
re-table it all again, but it's Sunday...

So the bottom line is that '\f' is what I was looking for - the Word crud is my 
problem. So double thanks ;-)

-- 
Steve
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RE: End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:56 -0600 19/1/14, Craig Ede wrote:

Well, I'm getting an even more peculiar result in FM7.0p579
The search dialog gives me an error saying I need to have text in the search
box when I look for \f alone.

How odd. FM7.0p577 for Mac here, and it works just fine. (I didn't know there 
was a p579 ;-)

If I change the search to something like .\f (to search for a period before
and end of flow) it finds all periods.

I suppose that's consistent with '\f' not working. Sort of.

Similarly with space. But it ignores the end of flow symbol and so finds 
periods at the end of every sentence or spaces wherever they occur. Useless!

Indeed.

Regarding Word inserting things:
It might work to copy one of the offending text sequences and then search
and replace with text via FrameMaker replace so you have a known series of
characters. There are things MIF wash doesn't seem to deal with. I get table
padding from Word that seems to be impossible to remove without creating a
new table and then pasting the content into it.

Ah. Um... [thinks...]

Going to end of flow and typing backspace/delete requires two key presses to 
delete the stop, suggesting strongly that there is an invisible something 
there. MIFfing the file and looking at it in a text editor (TextWrangler) shows 
something like this at the end of a cell:

   String `P'
Font
 FTag `Emphasis'
 FChangeBar No
 FLocked No
 # end of Font
String `roceedings of PLoP 1996'
Font
 FTag `'
 FLocked No
 # end of Font
String `.'
# end of ParaLine
   # end of Para
  # end of CellContent
 # end of Cell
# end of Row

('PLoP', for the curious, is a conference series, 'Patterns Languages of 
Programming')

So it looks like there's a needless font switch in the way. However, a few 
cells down, we have this:

  Font
 FTag `'
 FLocked No
 # end of Font
String `New York: Oxford University '
# end of ParaLine
   ParaLine
String `Press.'
# end of ParaLine
   # end of Para
  # end of CellContent
 # end of Cell
# end of Row

...but FrameMaker can't find the period at the end of 'Press' either! And 
again, in the document, two deletes at the end of flow are required to delete 
the period.

This substantiates your suggestion that Word crud can even hide in a MIF. A 
binary editor might find them, but I don't have one here.

'Go figure', as my US pal likes to write ;-)

-- 
Steve
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End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 16:53 -0600 18/1/14, Craig Ede wrote:

>/f, isn't it?

It may well be, but if so, this isn't implemented in my ancient version (7). 
I'll be moving to Framemaker 10 sometime this year, but not for the current job.

Just have to do it manually [sigh]. Thanks anyway though.
-- 
Steve

End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:07 -0600 19/1/14, Craig Ede wrote:

>Hmmm, I know I used it for searches in that version. Let me look into it on
>my old laptop.
>
>For FM 10 it's \f. Wildcards don't have to be on.

This is getting more interesting. \f does work in FrameMaker 7, but it only 
finds some instances of the '.\f' combo I'm trying to find.

However - and it's a big 'however' - the source came from Word, and the 
instances of '.\f' that FrameMaker *is* finding are those I've typed, but not 
those that came from Word. My guess is that - for the Word-sourced material - 
what looks like a period/end of flow on screen is something else, and/or has 
some invisible Word-type-crud after the period but before the end of the flow. 
And copying them from the document to the Find field doesn't work either: 
copy/pasting the period alone works, but doesn't work when '\f' is added to the 
find string.

Probably the best way to sort this is to de-table the lot, MIF-wash it and 
re-table it all again, but it's Sunday...

So the bottom line is that '\f' is what I was looking for - the Word crud is my 
problem. So double thanks ;-)

-- 
Steve

End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 09:56 -0600 19/1/14, Craig Ede wrote:

>Well, I'm getting an even more peculiar result in FM7.0p579
>The search dialog gives me an error saying I need to have text in the search
>box when I look for \f alone.

How odd. FM7.0p577 for Mac here, and it works just fine. (I didn't know there 
was a p579 ;-)

>If I change the search to something like .\f (to search for a period before
>and end of flow) it finds all periods.

I suppose that's consistent with '\f' not working. Sort of.

>Similarly with space. But it ignores the end of flow symbol and so finds 
>periods at the end of every sentence or spaces wherever they occur. Useless!

Indeed.

>Regarding Word inserting things:
>It might work to copy one of the offending text sequences and then search
>and replace with text via FrameMaker replace so you have a known series of
>characters. There are things MIF wash doesn't seem to deal with. I get table
>padding from Word that seems to be impossible to remove without creating a
>new table and then pasting the content into it.

Ah. Um... [thinks...]

Going to end of flow and typing backspace/delete requires two key presses to 
delete the stop, suggesting strongly that there is an invisible something 
there. MIFfing the file and looking at it in a text editor (TextWrangler) shows 
something like this at the end of a cell:

   

 
 
> # end of Font


 
> # end of Font

   > # end of ParaLine
  > # end of Para
 > # end of CellContent
> # end of Cell
   > # end of Row

('PLoP', for the curious, is a conference series, 'Patterns Languages of 
Programming')

So it looks like there's a needless font switch in the way. However, a few 
cells down, we have this:

  
 
> # end of Font

   > # end of ParaLine
   
   > # end of ParaLine
  > # end of Para
 > # end of CellContent
> # end of Cell
   > # end of Row

...but FrameMaker can't find the period at the end of 'Press' either! And 
again, in the document, two deletes at the end of flow are required to delete 
the period.

This substantiates your suggestion that Word crud can even hide in a MIF. A 
binary editor might find them, but I don't have one here.

'Go figure', as my US pal likes to write ;-)

-- 
Steve

End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

Anyone know if there is one? My docs don't mention it, only '$', which ain't 
the same thing at all. I need to find table cell contents that end with a '.' 
when they shouldn't (in a fairly large reference list).

Speaking of ends of flows, I've been reading the correspondence on Adobe's 
pricing, upgrades and licensing policies with interest. As an avid use and 
evangeliser of FrameMaker since version 3, I think some decisions have been 
made that Adobe could come to regret.

Thanks.
-- 
Steve
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End-of-flow wildcard?

[Steve Rickaby]

Anyone know if there is one? My docs don't mention it, only '$', which ain't 
the same thing at all. I need to find table cell contents that end with a '.' 
when they shouldn't (in a fairly large reference list).

Speaking of ends of flows, I've been reading the correspondence on Adobe's 
pricing, upgrades and licensing policies with interest. As an avid use and 
evangeliser of FrameMaker since version 3, I think some decisions have been 
made that Adobe could come to regret.

Thanks.
-- 
Steve

Request for EDD training material

[Steve Rickaby]

I'm forwarding this for an ISTC member. If anyone can point me/her in the 
direction of more up-to-date material than I used quite a few years ago, it 
would be a great help.

I used the EDD training course from Scriptorium, but a quick scan of their 
website failed to reveal same. If anyone from Scriptorium is reading this, I'd 
be interested to know whether they still publish their training courses.

At 14:58 + 16/1/14, Liz Gregory wrote:
I'm hoping one of you lovely people could point me in the direction of a good 
guide on creating DTDs, EDDs, and master pages in structured FrameMaker. I'm 
mostly using FM 10 but anything applicable for 9 or 11 I'm sure would be 
helpful too. I've not found the Adobe help to be especially useful and 
although I can get answers about specifics in the forums, I really want 
something a bit more step-wise.
 
I've been using FM10 for a while but with a really comprehensive package of 
structure and tools from a client. I'd really like to learn more about 
structure under the hood though so I can start building elegant DTDs of my 
own.
 
A book or blog or course or anything to get me started would be great - I 
guess I know what it is that I want to create, it's the line between here and 
finished that I just can't see at the moment!

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]
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Request for EDD training material

[Steve Rickaby]

I'm forwarding this for an ISTC member. If anyone can point me/her in the 
direction of more up-to-date material than I used quite a few years ago, it 
would be a great help.

I used the EDD training course from Scriptorium, but a quick scan of their 
website failed to reveal same. If anyone from Scriptorium is reading this, I'd 
be interested to know whether they still publish their training courses.

At 14:58 + 16/1/14, Liz Gregory wrote:
>I'm hoping one of you lovely people could point me in the direction of a good 
>guide on creating DTDs, EDDs, and master pages in structured FrameMaker. I'm 
>mostly using FM 10 but anything applicable for 9 or 11 I'm sure would be 
>helpful too. I've not found the Adobe help to be especially useful and 
>although I can get answers about specifics in the forums, I really want 
>something a bit more step-wise.
> 
>I've been using FM10 for a while but with a really comprehensive package of 
>structure and tools from a client. I'd really like to learn more about 
>structure "under the hood" though so I can start building elegant DTDs of my 
>own.
> 
>A book or blog or course or anything to get me started would be great - I 
>guess I know what it is that I want to create, it's the line between here and 
>finished that I just can't see at the moment!

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]

Re: Bizarre mouse behavior with FrameMaker

[Steve Rickaby]

At 21:15 -0600 26/12/13, qui...@airmail.net wrote:

Did you examine the Logitech software for the mouse? Or is it not installed?

Not installed: I use USB Overdrive for all mouse control. I have been using it 
for years and it's never given me any problems.

 If you are using only USB Overdrive, then perhaps the usual suspect is to be 
 blamed. Delete the preferences file for USB Overdrive and reset the 
 preferences.

I will try this, thanks. However, if there was something amiss there, I'd 
expect the mouse to misbehave all the time, instead of just very, very rarely. 
It looks like some bizarre interaction with FrameMaker. But as I'm using a 
very, very old version, I doubt if I'm going to fox out what's going on unless 
I get an 'Aha!' moment.

One fact, though: the problem is application-specific, to FrameMaker.

-- 
Steve
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Bizarre mouse behavior with FrameMaker

[Steve Rickaby]

At 21:15 -0600 26/12/13,  wrote:

>Did you examine the Logitech software for the mouse? Or is it not installed?

Not installed: I use USB Overdrive for all mouse control. I have been using it 
for years and it's never given me any problems.

> If you are using only USB Overdrive, then perhaps the usual suspect is to be 
> blamed. Delete the preferences file for USB Overdrive and reset the 
> preferences.

I will try this, thanks. However, if there was something amiss there, I'd 
expect the mouse to misbehave all the time, instead of just very, very rarely. 
It looks like some bizarre interaction with FrameMaker. But as I'm using a 
very, very old version, I doubt if I'm going to fox out what's going on unless 
I get an 'Aha!' moment.

One fact, though: the problem is application-specific, to FrameMaker.

-- 
Steve

Text flow around shrink-wrapped equations

[Steve Rickaby]

Could someone remind this idiot how to ensure that body text doesn't overlay an 
inline shrinkwrapped equation? It's a long time since I've had to use the 
equation editor, and the user guide doesn't offer any help.  I have a fraction, 
the denominator of which is being overlaid by the text line below.

FrameMaker's interface tells me that I can't set the text runaround from the 
graphics menu, and commands me to set the equation's frame to 'run into para', 
but if I do this the equation snaps to the start of the para.

I've tried the controls on the positioning palette, but they only shift the 
equation around and have no effect on text wrap.

Framemaker 7.
-- 
Steve
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Re: Text flow around shrink-wrapped equations [fixed, sort of]

[Steve Rickaby]

Thanks to Roger and Klaus for illuminating me.

This is maybe the only time I'd wished I was using InDesign instead of 
FrameMaker :-(
-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]
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Text flow around shrink-wrapped equations

[Steve Rickaby]

Could someone remind this idiot how to ensure that body text doesn't overlay an 
inline shrinkwrapped equation? It's a long time since I've had to use the 
equation editor, and the user guide doesn't offer any help.  I have a fraction, 
the denominator of which is being overlaid by the text line below.

FrameMaker's interface tells me that I can't set the text runaround from the 
graphics menu, and commands me to set the equation's frame to 'run into para', 
but if I do this the equation snaps to the start of the para.

I've tried the controls on the positioning palette, but they only shift the 
equation around and have no effect on text wrap.

Framemaker 7.
-- 
Steve

Text flow around shrink-wrapped equations [fixed, sort of]

[Steve Rickaby]

Thanks to Roger and Klaus for illuminating me.

This is maybe the only time I'd wished I was using InDesign instead of 
FrameMaker :-(
-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]

Re: Color in PDFs made from FM6

[Steve Rickaby]

On Fri, 20 Dec 2013 10:06:06 -0700, Michael Wiesenberg qatfr...@gmail.com 
wrote:

 Kindle deprecates PDF because the conversion from
PDF to Kindle doesn't retain all formatting
features.

This made me chuckle. The only book I've been involved with was that was taken 
to Kindle  (not by me) was *completely trashed* re. formatting features.

I have no idea how it was done: I only supplied prepress PDF from FrameMaker.

-- 
Stev
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