> Frame can search for character and paragraph format overrides now, so maybe
> he didn't feel it was necessary to update?
Sure enough! Wonder how long this feature’s been in FrameMaker without me
knowing it?!
Thanks for the info,
-Monique
___
This
Hello, Framers,
Just a quick note of thanks to the many of you who have shared your knowledge
and advice for so many years on this list!
As you can tell from my recent spate of messages, I’m doing a big cleanup of
templates and docs. I ran into an odd (to me) issue with the fonts. A font
Ok, ok—I'll abandon the idea of comparing MIFs. Clearly I didn't realize the
complexity (or pointlessness) of the effort. My tiny bit of MIF knowledge,
along with a bunch of unfounded assumptions, led me down the wrong path.
But I do like the idea of saving as TXT, which supports what I really
> Have you found the Track Changes and Track Text Edits features in FM
> inadequate in some ways?
No, not at all... *when I’m working in FrameMaker*. And I’ve also used the PDF
compare utility, which has improved immensely over the years.
But I’m wishing to do something totally different,
Do you really find it useful to diff MIF files very often?
Well, I haven't done it yet because it'd involve so much extra manual work.
But what I'd like to be able to do is simply scroll through the commit list
in my Git client (SourceTree on Windows) and have the diffs show
automatically,
> Frame can search for character and paragraph format overrides now, so maybe
> he didn't feel it was necessary to update?
>> Sure enough! Wonder how long this feature’s been in FrameMaker without me
>> knowing it?!
And offlist reply pointed me to a great feature comparison chart for FrameMaker
Hello, Framers,
I have some conditional text that contains cross-references to appendixes
(separate .fm files) that are not in the FrameMaker .book file (because the
hidden-condition state means that those appendixes are irrelevant).
When I update the book, I’m getting error messages about
When I update the book, I’m getting error messages about unresolved
cross-references to those non-existent files, even though the
cross-references are in conditional text that is hidden.
Well, weirdness. FrameMaker crashed on me (I had a TMP file open from a
previous Git commit; I opened the
Hello, Framers,
Now that I’m far enough along in my new doc with its several conditions, I’m
generating a PDF. But... unless I clear the “Show Condition Indicators”, the
table rows that have condition indicators (shading inside the cell borders) end
up with that shading in the PDF.
But I’m
> Maybe I'm missing something, but what works for me (in FrameMaker 10 and
> FM11) is to highlight the text inside the table cell, then: Paragraph
> Designer --> Table Cell icon (at far right) --> at Cell Vertical Alignment,
> choose "Middle" in the drop-down list --> then select Apply (or
> I cannot seem to get the text to be precisely vertically centered. It’s
> *almost* centered, and clearly is not Top, Bottom, or As Is. But *almost*
> centered is *not* centered. (No, users probably won’t notice. But I notice,
> and our design person has noticed and asked me to fix it.)
Hello, Framers,
I’m trying to vertically center text in a table cell (in unstructured
FrameMaker 2015, on Windows 7). I’m using a table cell for the title text, and
putting the table cell inside a text frame that’s identified as the TITLE flow.
I cannot seem to get the text to be precisely
I can give you a clean .fm file with none of the factory garbage if you
like.
I'm winding down on my spate of template work, and am ready to create
focused "doc_title_vars" and "condition" template files so that doc titles
and conditions can be more easily managed on a per-product basis even
And there are several FrameScripts out there that purge all catalogs for a
squeaky-clean import without any overlooked tags.
I'm likely to use the Color Tools, Character Tools, and Paragraph Tools
plugins from Silicon Prairie Software
(http://www.siliconprairiesoftware.com/Products.html), so
If you want a clean template you have to purge all these of any defaults
that are set for (at least) these eight container types: Page Layouts
(Body, Master and Reference) , Paragraph Formats , Character Formats ,
Table Formats , Object Styles , Color Definitions , User Variable
Definitions ,
You could keep the conditions in a separate file.
Ah, and just treat that file as a "template", and use it to import the
relevant conditions into the applicable docs' .fm files? I like that idea.
It would be easy to create a template_conditions_prod1.fm file, a
template_conditions_prod2.fm
Would it be an option for you to keep a copy of every FM document in plain
text? This is not as cumbersome as it sounds, since you can install an
Extendscript which saves the plain text copy automatically whenever you
choose File > Save. I've set up something similiar to have a readable copy
Has anyone used CudSpan’s Hunt (Pgf) Overrides with FrameMaker 2015 (FrameMaker
13)? On the CudSpan Plug-Ins page, it lists only up to FrameMaker 11. It’s
seems that my old version (back many years ago) is working fine, but I don’t
know if it’s missing anything or having some sort of unintended
I have been wishing for a feature like that for some time, but one that
would also handle variable values.
For variable management, I'd recommend taking a look at Leximation's
BookVars plugin: http://leximation.com/tools/info/bookvars.php.
-Monique
you can use the content layer to contain detailed descriptions of
everything that is defined in the template, and even a change history as
the template evolves. Self-documentation is a really powerful tool for
templates and stylesheets because I've never met anyone who can remember
all the
I am making the script available in exchange for a donation to my Ride for
Roswell 102 mile ride.
Thank you, Rick! This script is perfect for my workflow, and I'm more than
pleased with it :-).
-Monique
___
This message is from the Framers
Oops; I hit Send too soon; I did find some here:
http://www.i-frame.itl.info/en/feature-description/free-scripts.html.
-Monique
-Original Message-
From: Monique Semp
Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2016 9:09 AM
To: framers@lists.frameusers.com
Subject: resource for FrameScripts ?
You can
irie tools will make it easy to verify that I caught
everything.
-Monique
-Original Message-
From: Robert Lauriston
Sent: Wednesday, June 01, 2016 9:25 AM
To: Monique Semp ; framers@lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: [Framers] change the font - for *lots* of para & char style
You can get it free at
https://framescript.com/framescript-6-script-library/
FrameScript is no longer being sold by Finite Matters, but by Frank Elmore
(the developer), at a new website, framescr.com. And the link above for
finding a library of scripts just redirects to the new framescr.com.
It's not so much that there are different sets of tags for different doc
types, but there are different templates for the frontmatter, index, ToC,
and "content" parts of the doc. And that's not a problem because I can
change the relevant ones in one template/.fm file and import them into the
Hello, Framers,
I’m changing template fonts again for a corporate branding change, and wonder
what the easiest way is to change the font face for zillions (well, dozens) of
paragraph and char styles? It seems that the Paragraph Tools from Silicon
Prairie Software
Hello, Framers,
I’m debating the merits of including product line-specific conditions in
templates that are used for multiple product lines.
* Including the conditions in the templates makes it easy for new books to
inherit any conditions that exist, which helps prevent condition
Hello, Framers,
I believe that I can ease my template conversion project by “doing a MIF wash”
on a book before I begin the template import/revision process.
Now that I know much more than I did when I last rebranded these docs (~6 years
ago), and that the FrameMaker (2015) UI exposes much
Hello, Framers,
It seems that every time I close and restart FrameMaker, the scripts that I’ve
added to the Script Library/Catalog (not sure if it’s a “library” or a
“catalog”; the menus/labels seem inconsistent) disappear, and I have to add
them again.
I don’t want these scripts to be
I have the same problem (with FrameMaker 10). I thought the information
might be saved in maker.ini or in another configuration file but if it is,
I can't find it.
Oh, I didn't state so, but I'm using FrameMaker 2015 (FrameMaker 13), so an
issue that persists (unlike the script additions that
Hello, Framers,
I’ve recently purchased several ExtendScripts, and would very much like to
create keyboard shortcuts for them, but I’m stumped. If there’s a simple
few-step procedure, please share. If it’s complex, perhaps there’s some info
online that you could point me to as a starting
> Theoretically an ExtendScript can define it's own keyboard shortcuts - but
> this mechanism does not work at all (see end of line 04 hereafter)
01 // --- Menu definition for documents
02 var menuLocation = app.GetNamedMenu("FormatMenu");
03 var FMcalcMenu =
One approach is to use the code
Hello, Framers,
Sorry to do this, but I really want to post a message and see if it gets
through now that the list has again been reset.
Thanks for your patience; no reply is requested.
-Monique
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> Second this. Use the non-breaking space in the variable and do a
> search-and-replace at the end of production or when you're bored and staring
> at the screen.
Thanks, everyone. That’s what I’ll do. And I’ll add this to my production
checklist.
-Monique
You can update a variable in all .fm files in a .book with a single
import.
Yes, but that presupposes that you want *all* the variables from the source
file. But in my case, I have different variables in different FrameMaker
templates (for frontmatter, ToC, chapters), with only some
You have to define it, you have to check it on a few files, you have to
load the three books, you have to replicate t to the books, you have to
copy to the files and you have to check that nothing went wrong.
I've been using Leximation's BookVars utility,
Hello, Framers,
(Using FrameMaker 2015, but I don’t think that matters.)
I have a 2-word product name that I don’t want to break across lines. I know
that I could always use a non-breaking space between the words to prevent line
breaks. But that’s hard to remember to do all the time. And the
RE: one huge disadvantage - Starting with SnagIt 10, the removed the
capability to preset the resolution at which you
capture images. There's a thread about it here:
https://feedback.techsmith.com/techsmith/topics/restore_the_global_image_resolution_preference_setting
Actually, the setting *is*
I was never able to get rearranged pods to work properly. I just gave
up and lived with the bad defaults.
On Tue, May 24, 2016 at 1:53 PM, Monique Semp
<monique.s...@earthlink.net> wrote:
... I don't know what caused them to disappear and to be
non-responsive when re-added. But somethin
One of my engineers gave me a Word document that has an equation I need to
reproduce in Frame. One of the letters in that equation is a capital W with
what Word describes as a "hat". Essentially, it look like a left angle
bracket rotated 90 degrees to point up that has been placed over the W. It
Hello, Framers,
I’ve got an appendix that now should be shared among three different products’
docs, and among multiple docs for the same product, and I’m looking for best
practices re: conditions vs. variables vs. text insets.
(Sorry this is a long post. Just click delete if you’re not into
> But then, working with unstructured FM content in the 21st century is really
> not done, if you ask me. Converting is fairly easy - we do it all the time -
> so if you do not have structured content yet, look in that direction for your
> best practices.
Oh, I disagree strongly with this.
Yep, I participated in the "beta testing" for the most recent version of
BookVars, which works with FrameMaker 2015, and manages markers as well
(although I haven't tried that part yet).
And yes, BookVars is why I'm not minding a proliferation of variables in my
docs :-).
-Monique
* FrameInside/FrameOutside (or FrameLeft/FrameRight, if other settings
switch inside/outside to left/right) - Similar to
FrameAbove/FrameBelow, this would basically be a way to define in a
Paragraph Style that a reference-page graphic is to float out of the
text frame to the
Hello, Framers,
I’ve got smart spaces set for my docs. But... I’d prefer to not have it for my
code para styles. (For years I’ve been kludging it by using non-breaking spaces
or copy/pasting—but NOT by paste special > Text, which strips the formats/extra
spaces.)
But I can’t find any way to
Short story/theory:
* Resetting the workspace might fix things with respect to non-responsive
pods.
Long story:
All of a sudden yesterday, the FrameMaker 2015 pods, which have been stable
and placed in the same positions/tab groups for months and months (on the
right: top tab group for the
know and beat me to it
... ??
Cheers,
...scott
On 5/24/16 12:39 PM, Monique Semp wrote:
Hello, Framers,
I’ve got smart spaces set for my docs. But... I’d prefer to not have it
for my code para styles. (For years I’ve been kludging it by using
non-breaking spaces or copy/pasting—but NOT by paste special >
Is anyone using Silicon Prairie plugins with FrameMaker 15? The PDF on
the website says they support 12 but does not mention 15.
I recently used the ColorTools plugin with FrameMaker 2015 (which is
FrameMaker 13), and everything seemed to work fine.
I considered the Silicon Prairie tools
Hello, Framers,
I just became aware that there are now 4 updates for FrameMaker 2015:
https://helpx.adobe.com/framemaker/kb/resolved-issues-framemaker-2015.html.
I perused the list of features/bug fixes, and although much of it is irrelevant
for me, some of it would be nice to have (such as
Do I remember correctly that when a cross-reference's target is in
hidden conditional text it will show up in the Unresolved
Cross-References report?
And I seem to get Unresolved Cross-References even when the cross-reference
itself is conditioned-out by the same condition that hides the x-ref
> I'll be presenting nuts-and-bolts examples of how to do a bunch of
> "structured/DITA things" in Word, FrameMaker, Doxygen/Javadoc, and MadCap
> Flare...
I gave this presentation to the STC-Berkeley chapter last night, and per
several requests from this list, am sharing the slide deck. You
when we use the term "structure/DITA", don't we give the impression that
structured authoring is DITA? That you can't have one without the other?
And that's just not true. My experience is that you can easily (well,
relatively easily) implement structured authoring in a tool like
FrameMaker,
> The broader point I was commenting on is whether DITA has become so prevalent
> that people who do not know about structured authoring are starting to
> believe that implementing structured authoring is the same thing as
> implementing DITA, since the two terms are often used interchangeably.
Hello, Framers,
I’m sure that most of you know this already, but I’m also sure that I can’t be
the only one who didn’t know :-)...
Turns out that there *is* a way to Save All Files in a .book. With the .book
file the active window/pane/pod/whatever-you-call-it, hold the Shift key when
you
Hello, Framers,
I’ve just begun exploring the folders and groups feature of unstructured
FrameMaker 2015 (FrameMaker 13). This seems a great way to mimic a more
structured, topic-based authoring implementation.
But... unsurprisingly, every file in the folder starts on a new page. This does
> Have you tried changing the start tag placement to anywhere versus top of
> page?
Do you mean n the Paragraph Designer’s Pagination “pane”? If so, then yes. The
Start setting for the first paragraph (“heading 1”) is Anywhere. The Format is
“In Column”.
This folder construct seems to work
Hello, Framers,
For an FAQ doc, I’ve broken the usual “rule” of sensible-length headings
because I’m making them be the full text of a question. So with the font size,
the headings are often 3- or 4-lines.
The problem is that I have my master pages configured to include the heading
text in
I was just working in my **Unstructured** book and Frame 12 crashed. I
rebooted then restarted Frame and for some reason I am now in
**Structured** Frame. I have never worked in Structured Frame so I have no
idea how to get out of this.
(lmgtfy :-) See this article:
For all sorts of encodings for epsilon variants, see the Wikipedia article,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon. (I looked because I didn't know what
the "lunate epsilon" was.)
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I want to do a bullet list where the bullet is red, but the bullet text is
black.
I'm using FrameMaker 2015, but am pretty certain that this hasn't changed.
1. Define a color for the bullet, such as "color_bullets".
2. Define a char format, such as "|bullet" (I use the pipe so that these
I have a word (e-file) that should never be broken between lines. I've
tried following the help with no luck. I've even tried adding this word to
my personal dictionary but don't have rights to the \user\name\appdata
directory.
In such situations, I create a user variable, where I can use the
it appears Groups or Folders are my best bet.
Just be sure to choose carefully. I was just looking at the Help for this
yesterday, and here's an extract, for FrameMaker 2015:
---
You can create groups in a book file. Like folders, groups are also logical
containers in a book file;
they do
Alas, neither a Group nor a Folder does what I need. I put three files
into a Group, selected it, and printed it. I did the same with a Folder.
In both cases, the three files printed, but each started on a separate
page.
Ah, yes, this seems similar to a question I posted about a month ago,
Has anyone come up with the technique of having a file start immediately
after the previous file, on the same page?
I take it that text insets don't work for some reason?
This seems similar to a question I posted about a month ago, "concatenate a
book folder's files without pagination ?", and
Can you restore the folder the PDF is in, to just before you mistyped the
password?
? I'm not sure what you mean? I can access the network folder via Explorer.
It's just that when in Acrobat it won't access the folder. The PDF itself is
on my local drive; it's only the comments (those XML
> Are you talking about a footer row, or a table footnote? Footer rows appear
> on every page the table is on, footnotes appear after the entire table (and I
> wish that were something you could toggle between). If the row doesn't appear
> on every page, then it's not really a footer, is it?
>
Did you explain to the reviewer that the purpose of a footing row is
to let the reader see the column labels when they're viewing the
bottom half of the page?
Not sure that I agree that that's the primary purpose... But regardless,
no—I didn't bother. Given this reviewer, her authority, and
Hello, Framers,
(FrameMaker 2015)
Is it possible to have a table footing appear only on the last page of a table
that spans two pages? (I don’t think so, and nor do I think it particularly
desirable. But a reviewer wants it so.)
Thanks,
-Monique
___
Hello, Framers,
Unstructured FrameMaker, 2015 (on Windows).
I’ve found that FrameMaker adds an unwanted space between adjacent format
specifiers in variable definitions. It’s not only visible in appearance, but an
actual space that shows up in PDF output.
My goal is to create a variable where
Do I remember something about a key combination that turns a page into View
only and back?
Yes; try Esc Shift+f l (lowercase L) k.
(Found by googling "framemaker view only mode" :-).
HTH
-Monique
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When I create a blank document in FrameMaker 11, I would expect to see
predefined Running HF system variables in the Variables Pod, but they
are not there. Do I really have to build them myself or are they merely
hidden or do I not look in the right place?
Try viewing the master page (instead
Just wondering why the need to convert to FrameMaker at all? Why not just
use VSdocman and create the appropriate output
(http://www.helixoft.com/vsdocman/examples.html)? It purports to create
HTML, CHM, PDF, XML, and more.
That would mean, of course, that the result would likely be strictly
The bottom line is, if you experience this problem, simply reset your
local parameters file for Acrobat to "downsample=NO."
By "local parameters file", do you mean the joboptions file, and the three
(Color Images, Grayscale Images, Monochrome Images" separate "Downsample"
settings (which by
I use BookVars from
Leximation: [1]http://leximation.com/tools/info/bookvars.php. Although
only for variables, not the rest of the formats like the
ImportFormatsSpecialES, I think it offers more functionality for
complex variable management.
-Monique
References
1.
What about just including an appropriate icon as an image (so the Excel
worksheet symbol, for example), and hyperlinking it to the external file in
the same way one would add a URL?
I haven't tried it out myself, so just a thought. I did a quick google (I'm
not currently using FrameMaker, so
How can I make this file use the same Master Pages as other files in the
book?
You'll need to import the master pages from one of the other files. I don't
recall right off what happens if there are naming collisions (for the master
page names). And you probably don't want any old/extra ones
Grasping at straws: are the working links also .info?
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Regrettably, that isn't necessarily true. A lot of the folks who use InD
are first and foremost *designers*, and have no qualms about
hand-formatting everything on the page to produce a lovely composition.
Yes! I've indeed worked with InDesign designers who have every format
manually applied.
A remote possibility: The publish process isn't actually creating the
hyperlink, but it appears so because Acrobat generally (by default, I
believe) creates links from URLs (via the "Preferences > General > Create
links form URLs" setting). If this is the case, then I'd guess it's
Acrobat's
Monique, without tampering with the hypertext marker, if you skinny
down the page margins to force a URL to break to a second line and
then print that page to .ps and distill, can you create my problem or
does your resulting link in the PDF work correctly?
? Do you mean narrow my email message
So aside from the link char tag, is the text also using the Hypertext
marker? If not, I don't think that the FrameMaker publish/print process will
create the actual hyperlink, and that what's been working so far is just
Acrobats *viewing* feature. So the same PDF could have working links on one
This might be the reason we stopped actually doing index entries and have
been quietly deleting index files from our books (I have a former co worker
from another company who is in horror over this idea). Use the search,
people.
Well, sure. If I know the exact word to look for, ^F will find
Given this fact, I'm wondering if anyone knows of an online course(s) I
could take to how to do [API documentation].
Check out Peter Gruenbaum's classes on Udemy:
https://www.udemy.com/courses/search/?q=peter%20gruenbaum=ukw (this link
also shows some that aren't his, but some other person
My setup doesn't have any one-cell or one-page restrictions, and
enables easy copy/paste of the code from the generated PDF.
(I read the other replies, and actually am unclear as to whether a
solution has already been provided. Sorry if this is redundant info.)
I've used a combo of
Yep, me too. I'm not using FrameMaker at the moment (and haven't for
some time), but not only might I need to use Frame again in the future
(and so want to have had an ear out for issues), I learn many things
other than specific FrameMaker items from this list's membership! And
so
I've almost got it.
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Ah, thanks for the info. IIRC, I got the new (and therefore separate)
Acrobat to support a specific feature I wanted. But I was unable to
upgrade to the new Acrobat from the Acrobat that was part of the
versions of TCS and Creative Suite (CS) that I had. And a new Acrobat
was much
Hmmm... I just received two copies (one plain text, the other rich
text) of the message I just sent to the list about FrameMaker updates.
Seeing if it happens with this message, which has no links.
(Sorry -- Along with my Windows 10 machine, I've a new email client.
Well, an old
Hello, Framers,
First, my apologies. I did try to search both the Adobe site and the
[framers] archives, but although plenty of similar questions, seemingly
no definitive, likely-still-valid answers. So... I'm wanting to check
on some FrameMaker files that I haven't used since I got
Ah, think I got it. This will be the last reply for this matter. Thanks
for your patience.
On 4/10/18 4:57 PM, Monique Semp wrote:
Hmmm... I just received two copies (one plain text, the other rich
text) of the message I just sent to the list about FrameMaker updates.
Seeing
I installed all five updates in turn, and things seem fine.
It was still rather a challenge to get the pods docked to the right
side -- instead of drag-and-dock within the FrameMaker blank space, I
needed to drag-and-dock inside the file-content window. Then I did the
drag-and-dock
Oh, an even better link: the AP now has the singular _they_ in their
style book:
[1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2017/03/28/the-si
ngular-gender-neutral-they-added-to-the-associated-press-stylebook/?utm
_term=.a1385c09522b
References
1.
> I'd tend to agree with John's suggestion, but would do a copy edit to
replace "him" with "him or her."
I'd replace "him" with "them". It's now {acceptable or encouraged,
depending on the situation} to use "them" in the singular form. As it
was a long time ago.
See:
*
> does anyone have any ideas about how to repair a corrupt dictionary
file
Might you have a backup solution that keeps backups for long enough
that you could peruse the backups for a dictionary file old enough to
pre-date when the troubles started?
-Monique
I think what I've had to do is consistent with what you found, although
I didn't have quite the same display issues as you did. But
menus/displays weren't functional enough to actually use the product.
I have FrameMaker 2015 (as part of that era's Technical Communication
Suite), and
Yes, one can change it, in the "Change Bar Properties". I'm betting the
"how" differs based on FrameMaker version, so perhaps check out the
image results for a google search:
[1]https://www.google.com/search?q=framemaker+change+bar+color=isch
Yes, what Z said!
I haven't used FrameMaker for a goodly number of years now, having
moved to jobs that use a docs-as-code approach. (So Markdown, SSGs
[static site generators], developer tools.) And given the job market
and location I'm in -- the San Francisco Bay Area, and lots of
I've used (and liked a lot) the BookVars plugin from Leximation:
[1]https://leximation.com/tools/info/bookvars.php.
-Monique
On 2/12/20 9:39 AM, Martinek, Carla wrote:
Is anyone aware of a script for adding/creating variables from a list/table?
Ideally, you'd have the variable on
Hi Doug,
I don't have a straightforward answer for you, but I do have some
factoids that might help, from when I dealt with this the last time I
was using FrameMaker (2016). (I don't recall the details of any of
this, and do not have a working installation of FrameMaker at the
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