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Inspiring
July 13, 2009
Question

Character tag over whole paragraphs causes format override

  • July 13, 2009
  • 3 replies
  • 1647 views

Hello,

when I apply a character tag to a whole paragraph, FM displays a format override for that paragraph. Only after I re-apply the paragraph format, the override is gone. Do you have any recommendation to prevent the override in the first place?

I'm using FrameMaker 8.0p277 on Windows XP.

Regards,

Johannes

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    3 replies

    Inspiring
    July 14, 2009

    Thank you for your replies.

    That formatting issue most often occurs for me with the titles on segmented lists. In our template, character formats exist anyway for all kinds of keywords in the body text -- UI elements, filenames,command line parameters etc., therefore it wouldn't appear to be the ideal solution to introduce dedidcated paragraph formats.

    The extra space in plain formattting is the only workaround I've known so far, too.

    Leaving out the paragraph mark didn't work for me either, I'm afraid. Maybe there's some thing I didn't take care of?

    Regards,

    Johannes

    Arnis Gubins
    Inspiring
    July 14, 2009

    Might have been my faulty memory too...

    I think Mike is correct, you need to have a space (or any kind of non-printing character that doesn't have the character applied  to it to prevent the entire paragraph from having the override. I tend to use thin-spaces, so I don't notice the slight gap between the text and the end-of-paragraph mark.

    Community Expert
    July 15, 2009

    Hi,

    I wouldn't use a thin space or an en or em space or a non-breaking space at the end of the paragraph. All these prevent that the last word before the special space gets hyphenated. A regular space works equally well so that the whole paragraph is not marked as override. Just make sure that the space does not have the character format applied.

    Best regards

    Winfried

    Arnis Gubins
    Inspiring
    July 13, 2009

    If you need the character format applied to an entire paragraph, then perhaps a special paratag would be more appropriate?

    However, when applying a character tag to an entire paragraph, you will not get a paragraph override if you ensure that the end-of-paragraph (¶) mark is not part of the selection. You'll need to turn on your text symbols (View > Text Symbols) to be able to see this properly.

    Inspiring
    July 13, 2009

    However, when applying a character tag to an entire paragraph, you will

    not get a

    paragraph override if you ensure that the end-of-paragraph (¶) mark is not

    part of

    the selection.

    That has never worked for me. (Perhaps I have a different setting

    somewhere?) I've always added a thin space at the end of the paragraph, and

    kept it out of the selection. It seems that there has to be at least one

    character that is not selected to prevent the whole paragraph from becoming

    an override.

    Mike Wickham

    July 13, 2009

    This may count as a quick'n'dirty, but when I inherited a document with a similar problem I resolved it by adding a space at the end of the paragraph and applying the override/character tag to everything except the space.

    Thinking back, the guy who'd prepared the original had set a character style !hyperlink and used it on bulleted lists; relatively few occurrences, otherwise he might have considered a separate paragraph style for :ulHyperlink

    N