[Closed] FrameMaker 7.x/8 Feature Requests

Hmmmm.

If you have five adjacent index markers, and are using <$autorange> in the index, then your print will have a page-range and WWP output will have a marker for each of your five topics.

Cool, that works. Thanks Tim, I've not used <$autorange> before.

Cheers,

Sean

Since WWP no longer uses the index, this won't help with any online help issues in WWP 2003. I have no idea of WWP took advantage of this in WWP 7. I am told Mif2Go handles page ranges in its output.

Cheers,

Sean

Ah, cool! I hadn't realized this was available to us!

Thanks!

Bill --
<$autorange> does that. Place it directly in front of the <$pagenum> building block. For more info, see www.techknowledgecorp.com/help and click Indexes in the left column.

OK, here's a good one:

Kill <$startrange> and <$endrange> completely from index markers, and make FM intelligent enough to see sequential patterns and construct a range in the index itself.

Or, make it an option for those who prefer to index by term/single instance rather than muck with ranges directly.

Having an index that originally looks like "term 23, 45, 46, 47, 78" be converted to "term 23, 45-47, 78" automatically without the need for range entries would be very nice.

> For some reason my Frame crashes constantly ... Any ideas?

Please start a fresh thread, and cover the basics, like OS, any specific errors, anything common to the files, and so on.

I suggest that if a pdf does display without rotation, that it should display when rotated. I suggest that if a pdf displays in Frame for Windows, it should display in Frame for UNIX. I suggest that if an EPS does diesplay in UNIX, it should display in Windows.

UTF-8 appears to be working toward standard equations.

Line numbering? Required by some publishers, three clicks in Word, impossible w/out a developer kit in Frame!

For some reason my Frame crashes constantly. It happens most when there are multiple files open, but that's not necessary. It's almost impossible to work on anything. Any ideas?

Some desiderata:

1) Footnotes: echoing request #43, let's have at least the first line of the footnote text always appearing on the same page as the referring point and continued on the next page if necessary - with a facility to split long footnotes across pages flexibly.

Since there doesn't seem to be a wish-list for FM7.x/8 in the Framemaker + SGML forum, here is what I'm wanting for Structured FM:

2) An XML element on import defaults to a container, and in formatting this corresponds to a paragraph. But this creates difficulties when you want a list of several XML elements to be contained in a single paragraph, perhaps delimited by commas or semi-colons, with the penultimate element followed by an ampersand and the last by a period, e.g.
[Indent]x1, x2, x3, ... x(n-1) & x(n).
A solution to this is to use the Run-In Head option in the Paragraph Designer, but it wasn't really designed for this function and you may then have to define separate paragraph formats for the first, middle and last elements and (trickier) the penultimate element.
It's probably too deep in the FM software design to change it now, but ideally an XML element should default to a paragraph element, which may or may not constitute a whole paragraph.

3) Also in Structured FM, format rules should have the option of being ANDed instead of ORed.

> Whatever - PORT IT TO OS X!

Indeed. Frame, Acrobat, and Distiller are the only mainstream apps I use every day that prevent me from going OS X. (You see, when I do, I'm going 100% -- no "classic" apps for me!)

Ron Robertson (msg 235) said he'd use FrameMaker for word processing if it was OS X native. I have to agree. Word is buggy and unstable (it crashes about every two hours or so for me) while FM is the most stable piece of software.

Adobe could remarket FM as a word processor with balls.

Whatever - PORT IT TO OS X!