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C
cvgs
Inspiring
April 23, 2009
Question

Broken links when PDFing Structured FM 8 in Windows XP

  • April 23, 2009
  • 3 replies
  • 2890 views

We have a large number of links in our documents that are created using structured Framemaker 8.0 in a Windows XP environment. The xrefs work fine in FM, but once they have been PDF'd all of the links are broken. Since these are large documents, it can take over a day to relink everything.  All links are created using the fm-xref tag and link to other topics/items within the FM book.

Any suggestions for what may be the problem?

I am also posting this in the Acrobat forum.

This topic has been closed for replies.

3 replies

A
Anonymous
April 23, 2009

I had this problem a while ago.

I think you have to switch on the "Create Named Destinations for All Elements and Paragraphs" option on the Links tab of the PDF print options in FM8.

R
Russ Ward
Legend
April 23, 2009

The creation of a named destination for a cross-reference target should be automatic. If you really do have to force named destinations for all paragraphs, I'd say this is an unsettling bug.

Arnis Gubins
Arnis Gubins
Inspiring
April 23, 2009

Russ,

As you say it should, but it isn't guaranteed. Shlomo Perets has pointed out numerous times that FM tends to "forget" some destination targets (or they get cleaned out in the PDF optimizations), so it's safest to explicitly force FM to set them all.

R
Russ Ward
Legend
April 23, 2009

cvgs,

Are you generating the PDF at the book level? If so, all inter-book links should work, barring any strange things that might be caused by the DITA app. What error does the link give you in Acrobat?

I hope you get some of these issues worked out. It really sounds to me that you are missing out on some of the primary benefits of FrameMaker as a desktop publisher for long documents. If you can't find some resolution to these problems you've encountered, I'd recommend that you consider other DITA applications for authoring and/or publishing content. If you want to stick with FM, you might also consider abandoning DITA for a less complex structured workflow. Unless you really need compliance with DITA, you can get many of its important features without it.

Russ

Arnis Gubins
Arnis Gubins
Inspiring
April 23, 2009

If the links work fine in the FM book, then I would suspect that the PDF files have either been renamed or moved to a different location and relative paths are now munged.

To check what is going on in the PDF, in Acrobat using the Link tool, examine the Properties of some of the broken links (and from that panel you have to click the Edit button to see actual details) in order to find out where exactly the link is trying to go to.

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