[Closed] FrameMaker 7.x/8 Feature Requests

Ditto.

BTW, am not opposed to different ways of managing things like tags and fonts, I just don't believe doing this in the same way Word currently does would be better.

Cheers,

Sean

2) Inheritable Para/Char Tags ala MS Word.

One of the recurring themes in this Feature Requests thread has been better book-level management of all document elements. If FrameMaker were to include improved methods for globally managing fonts (both missing and otherwise), paragraph and character styles, tags of all sorts, et alii, I wonder if it wouldn't create a useful compromise between Word's sometimes annoying "based on" style update behavior, and FrameMaker's sometimes annoying by-the-each style update behavior.

I'll keep this posting short, but I think those who've been reading the thread will understand my reference to the ongoing desire for FrameMaker 8 and beyond to include better book-level tools in the pursuit of effective and efficient document management. I mention this now because I see such improved capablities as possibly striking a usable balance between feature request's such as Mike's vis-a-vis the desire to keep FrameMaker blissfully un-Wordlike.

Cheers & hope this helps,
Riley

Mike, checkout Global Update Options. For example, open character designer. Set everything to AS-IS. Change the font to what you want. Use Commands > Globat Update Options to change All Characters and Catalog Entries. Anyway, check it out.

As for the cascading option, what I don't want is moving the doc to another PC causes automatic updates, or unintended consequences, or overrides being applied from reserved or default styles, et al. No. Instead, I prefer to be able to control all such changes. Additionally, my styles don't update very often and my font set is pretty restricted. Furthermore, just select the content you want to base something on, and use New Format to create a new tag, and then reformat it as needed--creation is easy enough without cascading anything. Word's implementation of this is flawed to the point of causing rework. No thanks. But, you are going to have some debate over such requests, it's (hopefully) up to Adobe to sort us out.

Cheers,

Sean

    2) Inheritable Para/Char Tags ala MS Word.





   Uuugh. No thanks.

Huh?!? No PLEASE! Give us this option. I recently went through the excercise of changing the font for 90% of my para tags. I would love to have an option to declare that a paragraph tag's font be the same as the 'body' for example.

> 2) Inheritable Para/Char Tags ala MS Word.
> Uuugh. No thank

Huh? There is actually objection to this? Anybody wanting to define a style that doesn't depend on another can do so, but the cascading

"StyleB" is "StyleA + two small changes"

is incredibly useful for maintaining consistency and not having to write down all kinds of settings to make sure that the above relationship actually holds.

Is this a *bad* thing to offer?

A few thoughts:

>2) Inheritable Para/Char Tags ala MS Word.

Uuugh. No thanks.

>5) Add a "Save All Dammit" button.

Give the book the focus and Shift+Click the File menu.

>7) Allow a "Formats" document to be included in a book, but excluded from printing and formatting - I have created a "StyleReference" document in my book that defines the formatting: para/char tags, master pages, documentation on the formatting, and the like. I'd like to exclude this from printing (as well as make it the default for all "import" operations).

You need to use more than one book. Have one book for print and another for everything including your styleref document.

>8) Per-document naming of Right/Left pages - The main chapters in the book have standard Left/Right master pages, but in the front/end matter, the formats are a bit different. I know I can redefine the right/left pages in those documents, but this breaks the "everything comes from the master StyleReference document" model.

Add the master pages you want, and, in the case of the last page, map them. As for the index, create and map custom master pages.

Otherwise: fair enough.

Cheers,

Sean

I used FrameMaker 3.0 briefly in 1992-ish and have recently picked up Frame 7.0 for a large (~350 page) book editing project. I'm shocked how much I don't like FrameMaker. A certain amount of it is the usual frustrations of learning something new, but some things seem incredibly amateurish.

0) Is it my imagination, or does font display suck. I don't remember that for a given pointsize that MS Word displayes things so unclearly. This could be my choice of fonts, though?

1) The Fonts That Will Not Die are simply maddening, and it's ridiculous to need to go into the MIF to fix them. A couple of plugin designers I've talked with say that even the FDK doesn't expose enough to fix this with tools.

2) Inheritable Para/Char Tags ala MS Word. It's nuts to define three or four paragraph styles that are all "based on" one style and have to do them all from scratch. I want to define "Bullet" and have "Bullet First" as "Bullet + one or two things", so when I change the fonts or something, I don't have to go all over.

3) Add a comment field for tags - allow me to make some notes in the definition that inform other authors, the copy editor, or the compositor what this is about. This could then be used by (perhaps) a third-party tool that makes a "Tag Library" printout that gives a usage list.

4) Add a Source Code Control Interface (only under Windows, perhaps). The Windows SCCAPI allows hooking into something like Source Safe or Perforce and more and more tools are including this.

5) Add a "Save All Dammit" button. When I close a book with lots of documents open, I shouldn't have to confirm every single book.

6) More granularity on imports - I have a book with 4 "prefix" documents, 13 chapters, and a couple of "postfix" documents, and via the Book interface have the page/chapter numbering all squared away. But if I import (I think) Page Layouts to get things like master page settings, it overwrites all the numbering. This is maddening.

7) Allow a "Formats" document to be included in a book, but excluded from printing and formatting - I have created a "StyleReference" document in my book that defines the formatting: para/char tags, master pages, documentation on the formatting, and the like. I'd like to exclude this from printing (as well as make it the default for all "import" operations).

I know I can store this stuff in one of the "Regular" documents, but then it's not obvious to the next in line (compositor, etc.) which one holds the master.

8) Per-document naming of Right/Left pages - The main chapters in the book have standard Left/Right master pages, but in the front/end matter, the formats are a bit different. I know I can redefine the right/left pages in those documents, but this breaks the "everything comes from the master StyleReference document" model.

I'd like to tell the index that you're using "IndexLeft" and "IndexRight", and have this not be overwritten by imports.

9) Provide some kind of book-wide Font-translation settings - When opening a document that has unknown fonts, look in the table to say "Ah, he already said that Utopia can be replaced with Times New Roman" and not object - but still retain the original names. Only fonts not in the known-about table would create this objection. Then when I select all the documents in my book and Open them, I don't have to click OK 20 times, and book-wide searches wouldn't fail unless all the documents were open.

This should be an importable setting in each document.

10) In the FrameMaker console, include an "in file XXX" message. When I open up a whole raft of documents, the console shows all the fonts that it hates, but it's not clear which document included which fonts.

11) Create some kind of document "validator" - if a paragraph or table tag mentions a character tag that doesn't exist, this should be something that a validator can find. It's unbelievably tedious to do all of this by hand.

I use QuicKeys to create my own keyboard sequences. There are many other equivalent products available. I find this far better than having FM prescribe the sequences as I can use sequences whose mnemonics make sense to me as well as come up with special sequences peculiar to my own work.

Cheers,
rob.calm

In the FrameMaker documentation, to each description of a function add any and all keyboard shortcut sequences pertaining to the described function.

As it stands today, one first finds the feature or topic they want, then performs the equivalent of a reverse lookup to find the keyboard sequence, if any, for the feature. A simple documentation update would add to the usability of FrameMakers OLH.

Cheers & thanks,
Riley

I second Andrew McDade's request for greater differentiation among marker symbols. The symbols are too hard to pick out from the text, and in the case of frame anchors tend to obscure sentence periods. Also, I just spent an hour fixing some index entries that were accidentally entered as cross references but looked exactly alike in the marker symbols.

It would be very helpful if I could choose the color and maybe the shape of the symbol for each marker type. As an experiment, I created an "attention" character format that turns a character red, and -- rather laboriously -- applied it to all the marker and anchor symbols in the chapter I was working on. Not only do the symbols stand out from the text, but it is now possible to see text -- and periods -- that the symbols would otherwise obscure. If only this color could be applied automatically....