Known Participant

Question

Automating PDF file info from single-sourced FM files?

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
August 14, 2019
4 replies
774 views

We generate several PDFs from each FM document. Webmasters have asked us to start adding the PDF filename into the File Information field.

We custom-name each PDF as we create it. We have too much volume to manually add the filename to the PDF at each printing.

I can't find a way to configure the FM document so it generates specific file information for each condition-setting version.

What automation tool(s) are likely to help?

This topic has been closed for replies.

Bob_Niland

Community Expert

If the documents are FM books, you can have a separate parent .book file for each instance, with its own metadata.

If they are single .fm file documents, I'm wondering if .book parents could be created for them anyway.

S

Stefan Gentz

Legend

Would it be a simpler solution if you rename your FrameMaker file to match the required final name pattern? Or maybe with a combination of it like "doc#-productname-revision"? For handover to the webmaster you can then just delete the "-revision" part in the filename (and for many files there are good file renaming tools with pattern matching for s few bugs, that could automate this step.

M

maryhsAuthor

Known Participant

We might be able to use Bob's idea of extra copies of the
.book files. I'll have to talk about it with the other writers. It would certainly work to insert the file
info into otherwise-exact copies of the .book file. There'd be overhead remembering to generate
each brand from its specific .book, to redo any book-level changes to all
variants, and figure out how to organize those variants in the archive for next
rev. Thanks.

In answer to Stefan's questions--

The webmasters originally did ask us to hand over
documents in their pattern -- but their naming conventions changed more than
once and was extra work. We are trying
to touch each PDf only once, and so we release them with their unique,
predictable filename in an archive where everyone else picks them up when
needed. (Including the webmasters.) Unfortunately,
the webmasters support quite a few other divisions, so stripping the revision
level wasn't as straightforward as they would have liked. Rev -C got conflated with a -C Canadian
version, for example.

I'm going to leave this an active question until Monday
though, in case someone comes up with an idea with less overhead.

M

maryhsAuthor

Known Participant

(Sorry for the weird formatting -- I'm not sure where those extra line breaks came from!)

M

maryhsAuthor

Known Participant

Re-reading, I wish I could go back to edit. I tried to keep my question short and oversimplified.

The PDFs I create are named "doc#-revision.pdf" (unique filename for tracking).

The webmasters post PDFs named "doc#-productname" (unchanging filename for easier website updates).

They said they can save my PDF according to what's in the PDF "document title" field.

PROBLEM: As far as I can tell, FM only maintains one text string for the File Info field for any particular book. I would need a way to generate that field differently for each conditional-text version in the book.

We don't have FrameScript, but I'm willing to consider it if it's known to work.

F

FieryPantone

Legend

Can't help, I'm afraid, with automatically populating the file info fields of a .pdf – but I have to wonder why your webmasters want you to duplicate the filename!

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