Re: Equation editor for FrameMaker?

Bob_Niland · Jan 10, 2026

Anyone who has recent experience with equations in FM might need to know if this is structured or un. If already working in XML, importing a .mml object from another app strikes me as a path. If the contents don't need to be referenced within FM, importing as PDF, SVG (perhaps with outlined text) is a possibility. EPS still works, but might be incompatible with output format intents.

Bob_Niland · ‎Jan 08, 2026

You might also be able to use or create a new directory for the .fm file that would have the legacy path relationship to the images directory. Put the .fm file (or a copy of it) there. Once it opens without errors, while open, re-save it to where it needs to be today. It will update all the paths when you do that. I recall having needed to do this at least once. If you can't do that (for example, the new /dir would need to be above the root of the filesystem), you might be able to similarly move all of the images to a new dir, then save, close and copy the nown-revised .fm file to the new location.

Bob_Niland · ‎Jan 02, 2026

re: I suppose I will have to re-install the program. Worth a try. I seem to recall that there is some local / localization / temp / roaming directory that is worth deleting or renaming, and just restarting FM, but I don't recall and can't find the details. Perhaps one of the other old hats can clarify.

Bob_Niland · ‎Jan 02, 2026

If you can (or cannot) create a new deminimus book, that could be useful info. I presume you've tried rebooting the machine. (I have seen one instance of the networking stack on Win11 getting into an odd state that required a reboot. A similar problem with the filesystem stack wouldn't surprise me.)

Bob_Niland · ‎Jan 02, 2026

Did you try the Notepad test? Did you try to create a new .book? re: Do you know whether it is possible to contact Adobe directly? Other than for installation/licensing questions, no. It probably requires a support contract for app tech support questions, and I know nothing about those (and never needed one in 30+ years of using FM). Even via that route, their first question is apt to be: so what changed? This strikes me as more likely a local IT issue than an Adobe IT issue.

Bob_Niland · ‎Jan 02, 2026

Where are the .book files? Local machine, enterprise network, CMS server, cloud? Can you open a troublesome .book with Notepad? If will be gibberish, but will confirm that it's not a file system problem. (and I don't suppose that .MIFs were being kept for the projects) Just as an experiment, if you can open the .fm files, can you make a new .book, close it and open it?

Bob_Niland · ‎Dec 31, 2025

FMdk: We are talking about OLE - Object Linking and Embedding, are we not? That's unclear from the basenote. re: This used to work in FrameMaker, I believe. Based on some recent forum traffic, it apparently still does. I've never used it myself, because nearly all of my work has been in cross-platform FM environments (Windows:Unix), and Windows OLE only works on Windows.

Bob_Niland · ‎Dec 30, 2025

You might copy that • out of the MIF and confirm that it's a U+2022: BULLET and that the Bullet para font on your FM2022 system populates that code point. Unicode has a lot of bullets, but they are all BMP (U+FFFF or below), so this isn't an SMP problem. The •? does not make sense on its face. If \u2022 is unpopulated, should should see: ?› The If no tab is set, you should see: •›The ? normally means ‘current font doesn't populate codepoint’, but the bullet is working, and the \t is more likely just a rendering instruction, possibly not even emitted as U+0009: CHARACTER TABULATION (\x09) but even if it was, it's a whitespace character, has no glyph, and should never throw a ?. You might try selecting all of the Format:'s •\t and replacing it with a fresh \b\t just to ensure no stray hidden characters.

Bob_Niland · ‎Dec 29, 2025

re: FrameMaker essentially treats the imported PDF pages as graphics. To plainly state the implication, yes, only one source PDF page is obtained per Import. And even that may only work if the source PDF has sufficiently open security. If the source documents are also FM, importing by reference (Text Inset) from the .fm sources, or adding whole files to Book are a possibilities, and provide more options in the referencing file. Importing PDF often makes sense, and going forward is likely preferrable to importing EPS for certain object types.

Bob_Niland · ‎Dec 26, 2025

I might add that this MS PowerToys keymapping works fine in Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop. So this seems to be peculiar to DW Code View (and has been reported via the crash dialog). I don't even need to test it to report that these SMP keys won't work in Adobe Framemaker, as FM has never had fully working support for text codepoints above U+FFFF, however entered; (tracker FRMAKER-10976). It doesn't crash, but will render as ?? or ????. I work around that with EPS imports.

Bob_Niland · ‎Dec 24, 2025

eric: I coped one from another project and changed the name worked. That usually doesn't work. Have FM create a new one. Import Formats from one you like.

Bob_Niland · ‎Dec 22, 2025

Which “correct” advice? What FM version? What platform? But yes, it should be possible to Save-as-PDF, Print-to-PDF, and Publish-to-PDF from FM without having the full Acrobat product.

Bob_Niland · ‎Dec 21, 2025

re: I've had to deal with this quite a bit on a current project, and use Variables to handle it. For BMP codepoints not in my Body font, the var def invokes a character format calling for a font that does. For SMP codepoints, the var has to invoke a legacy/overlay font that populates the desired glyph at some low order (usually ISO 8859-1) hex value. This SMP problem is still with us (and I have no information on whether or when it might get fixed)… The variable hack works to PDF and print, but has the drawback that the actual codepoint for the mimicked SMP character is not going to be U+1F322, but \x53 (in the example earlier); something in the \x00…\xFF (U+0000…U+00FF) range. This will then be an entirely different glyph in the ASCII…Latin1 range if copied out of your PDF and pasted into Notepad, “S” for the example. Where you want to include a Unicode SMP character in an FM document (FM8…FM17.0.8) and have it be preserved as a selectable Unicode character in the PDF or XML workflow, there appear to be two methods, and you may need to implement them both (via Conditional Text) if both output workflows are needed: To PDF Bring the SMP text in as an EPS text object with embedded {subset} font. I've been doing this, and it works. You will not be able to Index, Xref that as text within FM, but it's otherwise treated as any other EPS object. A later edition of the prior project switched to doing it this way. Being EPS, of course, it won't flow to HTML or XML with any elegancy at all. To HTML/XML Bring the SMP text in as an SVG text object. And here, the challenge is font declaration or embedding, and is not a workflow I have explored. There are apparently some 4 ways to do it. But because the target output is HTML or XML, font control is presumably under control for the project.

Bob_Niland · ‎Dec 19, 2025

I'm normally running in View🞃 Split… ✓Code-Live I've used MS PowerToys Keyboard Manager feature to remap the F1-F12 keys to various Unicode characters (and one string) frequently employed. Some of these are Unicode BMP characters (U+0000 to U+FFFF) range, such as: ⇩ U+21E9 DOWNWARDS WHITE ARROW These work everywhere I've used them. About half of them, however, are from the Unicode SMP range (U+10000 and up), such as: :magnifying_glass_tilted_right: U+1F50E RIGHT-POINTING MAGNIFYING GLASS These work in all other apps, but can crash DW, when: ☐ entered via the remapped Fₙ keypress ☐ but only in the DW Code View window. When typed into Code View, DW freezes, thinks about it for several seconds, and then crashes, throwing a Sorry, an error occurred dialog. I can repeat this reliably via New HTML document, where merely trying to type: ‹p›🔎‹/p› in the ‹Body› content. The Error report details curiously includes: ‹crash exception="EXCEPTION_UNKNOWN" exceptionCode="0xe06d7363" instruction="0x00007FF95D1E782A"› SMP otherwise works in DW. There is no crash when: ◊ typed into DW Live View window via that same Fₙ key🤔 ◊ pasted into Code View from elsewhere (including from the Live View window) ◊ entered as Entity markup 🔎 or 🔎 I have no solid guesses as to what's happening. Is PowerToys sending UTF-16, UTF-32 or even UCS-2, into an app expecting ‹meta charset="utf-8"› ? So I'm not sure this is Adobe's problem. But if you encounter it, the work-arounds are above. And if you can't replicate it, that would be interesting. In actual working documents, a fair amount of work can be lost, not present in any recovery file DW has created. So save early & often. Tech Notes: Windows 11 Pro 24H2 26100.7462 Dreamweaver 21.7 Angle brackets above are ‹ (&lsaquo) and › (&rsaquo;) to prevent re-interpretation by the site engine (as happened with some of the Unicode above—with any luck, the new forum engine won't be as destructive).

Bob_Niland · ‎Dec 08, 2025

Rick: I don't think the master page mapping works with … paragraphs that are in table cells. That's been my experience. Sometimes you can work around it by setting the Range Indicator to Until Changed. Otherwise it might need a script or some hacky stuff, like invisible metadata on the page (not in the table), Table as Inset from it's own file, Table-per-page mocked up to appear continuous, etc.

Bob_Niland · ‎Dec 04, 2025

What platform are you trying to run FM11 on? While one might guess Windows, I suppose it could be Mac, and less likely Solaris. If Windows, that would presumably be Win11. Even if you get past the FM11 licensing DRM issue, will it run with all features? No guesses.

Bob_Niland · ‎Dec 02, 2025

It looks like (at least) the typeface, point size & justification of the lower/added text is different: sans-serif, larger & ragged-right. If that's the problem at hand, as Jeff suggests, just apply the paragraph format (style) of the existing paragraphs to the new content.

Bob_Niland · ‎Nov 29, 2025

Voted, but I suspect that unbalanced double-boxing is only one of many table enhancements that the FM team is getting. Rounded corner tables would be another one, and somewhat to my susprise, I see that ID can't do those either—you need a Barb hack—and that only mimics the outer border. Whereas in HTML(CSS), I'm doing this sort of table routinely.

Bob_Niland · ‎Nov 29, 2025

Various people are likely scratching their heads, because FM trial subscriptions are no-charge & self-cancelling (if not upgraded to paid).

Bob_Niland · ‎Nov 25, 2025

Orly5E82: …just remembered, I changed my printer settings a few days ago to actually print paper.... Now, I just needed to change my Printer Setup back to "Adobe PDF" and all is working fine again I'm wondering why that mattered. What was the printer model (driver) that was configured when it wasn't working? Back in the early days of Windows (like 3.1), the WYSIWYG screen rendering (via the GDI) would be constrained to the capabilities of the printer model configured. If, for example, you configured a daisywheel printer, FM's presentation of a page got extremely primitive. If it's still possible to configure a printer that can't do graphics, or has a coarse grid, I suppose graphics artifacts would be possible.

Bob_Niland · ‎Nov 25, 2025

What happens with: Window🞃 Toolbars > ✓ Graphics Toolbar

Bob_Niland · ‎Nov 24, 2025

It appears that Custom Ruling & Shading can only do a simple Double, and Edit Ruling Style of it would change both lines. Table-within-Table might work. Reference Frame object might work. Imported graphic, sent to back might work. If the Table content doesn't need to be referenced, doing the table in an external app, would provide flexibility.

Bob_Niland · ‎Nov 24, 2025

Orly5E82: The graphics are normally embedded Visios. That's a bit ambiguous. Embedded implies pasted into FM, rather than imported by reference or OLE. Can you clarify? Visio can export or save-as vector in a number of file formats (SVG, WMF, likely PDF, perhaps EPS), and if that's known, some gambits might be suggested. FM probably cannot import .VSD or .VSDX directly. If using OLE, see: Is there any way to display Visio-embedded FM file in Robohelp properly?

Bob_Niland · ‎Nov 23, 2025

And alternatively, if it's a question of Greek text characters (ΓΔΘΛΜΝΞΟΨΩπρςστ) no longer working, when they once did, then the top suspect is prior use of a legacy overlay [code page 28597] font vs. Unicode Greek (e.g. U+0370…) and in either case, whether the assigned font populates the code points. FM version might come into play as well.

Bob_Niland · ‎Oct 29, 2025

Since this is presumably now Windows 11, perhaps the first thing to optimize is the system scaling: ⊞Start ⇢ ⚙Settings ⇢ 🖵System ⇢ 🖵Display ⇢ 🞖Scale

Bob_Niland · ‎Oct 20, 2025

Gorly: Saving a structured document in unstructured FM flattens that file. Does it also pop a yes/no dialog warning that the operation cannot be undone? If so, in-app reversion is immediately lost. For some wider context: Early versions of FM only had one level of undo, as I recall. At some point multiple-level undo was implemented. But the undo stack is not saved in the .fm or .book file, and is lost when that file is closed in FM. Some things (alerted by that dialog) are never undoable. The automatic .backup.fm can also be lost in some scenarios, so needs to be renamed or otherwise preserved prior to opening a document for troubleshooting. Being on a journaling file system provides a major safety net.

Bob_Niland · ‎Oct 09, 2025

Top suspect: I've never been able to get AMP (Apply Master Pages) to trigger from content in Table cells. It has to be some other content on the page (which could be hidden meta for the purpose). I haven't challenged this in a while, so newer FMs may have enhanced to implement it. Next suspect: I don't work in struc, but I suspect that Struc FM has the same pagination limitations as unstruc. It's always been my understanding that FM can't mix page sizes in a single document (.fm file), and this probably extends to same-size pages that are rotated in the output. Exception pages have to be separate .fm files in a .book. I have done portrait-orientation pages with rotated (landscape) content, and those Master Pages do map correctly.

Bob_Niland · ‎Oct 08, 2025

Is the target of the link: (a) the same document, or (b) another document? Many more suspects for (b) problems.

Bob_Niland · ‎Oct 08, 2025

And what do the hotspots need to do? 🞂 be links that go somewhere? 🞁 be pop-up hovertips? or both. Also, hotspot regions, or just specific objects? I used to do part callouts as ordinary hyperlinked text in the callout bubbles, which went to the parts list pages (and the callout number was auto-numbered from those pages).

Bob_Niland · ‎Oct 02, 2025

Dave wrote: «Just out of curiosity, what new features are you looking for? Structured or unstructured features?» I work in unstruc, but could switch to struc if FM could do all of these, single-master, flow to PDF and HTML: FRMAKER-10976, having FM support more than 35% of Unicode: I have to work around this for PDF by using EPS text imports (so that they are selectable/searchable in PDF), and that's both a deprecated vector graphics format, and doesn't flow to HTML. FRMAKER-2294, spot cross-reference: having FM Xref by some convenient form of metadata at the source, such as MarkerText, so I can stop using hidden $paratext hacks for the purpose. Apparently, this can be done in struc, but I'm not going there while #1 is still festering. Hovertext that works to PDF and becomes title="hover text" and alt="hover text" to HTML. This may be co-limitation of PDF as well.

Bob_Niland

Bob_Niland

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