Skip to main content
Jon White – Vistair
Jon White – Vistair
Participating Frequently
June 17, 2022
Question

Exporting an element catalog as an EDD does not include PgfBoxColor

  • June 17, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 398 views

Hello all,

If I export the element catalog as an EDD from a structured document, I find that PgfBoxColor is not included in the resulting EDD, even though it exists in the original document's element definitions.

This means that the sequence:

  1.  Open a structured document;
  2. Export element catalog as EDD (Structure | EDD | Export Element Catalog as EDD, or Esc  f D X);
  3. Save the resulting EDD;
  4. Import new EDD into original document.

…changes the formatting of the document, which should not happen.

 

I am using a customised EDD template. That is, I have replaced the file fminit/fmstruct/elemcat with a file containing Lynne Price's Meta-EDD (modified to support elements added in recent versions of FrameMaker, among other changes). I thought that this might have something to do with it, but replacing elemcat with the original installed copy produces the same result.

 

Has anyone else seen this behaviour, or is anyone able to replicate what I'm seeing?

 

Thanks very much.

 

JDW

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Jon White – Vistair
    Jon White – VistairAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    June 17, 2022

    Apologies, I forgot to mention that this is in FrameMaker 2020. v16.0.2.916

    Matt-Tech Comm Tools
    Community Expert
    Matt-Tech Comm ToolsCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    June 21, 2022

    Hi Jon, interesting that the PgfBoxColor is not written. Probably an oversight on Adobe's part, as the PgfBoxColor is a fairly recent addition to FrameMaker.

    There's always the possibility that it's already been fixed, though, in Fm 16.0.4.

    If not, I'd recommend reporting this as a bug at tracker.adobe.com

     

    **But why do you need to export the element catalog to an EDD?

    The original EDD is likely to have better organization in it, and almost certainly would have the PgfBoxColor setting already defined.

     

    Adding the PgfBoxColor setting to your exported EDD should be pretty quick, though, if you don't have the original EDD and don't want to wait around for a patch or a new version.

     

    -Matt.

    -Matt Sullivan, FrameMaker Course Creator, Author, Trainer, Consultant
    Jon White – Vistair
    Jon White – VistairAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    June 21, 2022

    Hi Matt, thanks for your response; I'll put in a bug report. Updating to FrameMaker 16.0.4 is an option, but not one I'll take up lightly, as we have 45 seats and a very extensive ecosystem around FrameMaker: the testing to move to FrameMaker 2020 last year took a couple of months.

     

    I quite often extract element definitions from a document, even though I have access to the EDD. This is because our main production EDD is quite large at (currently) 3092 pages. We have a number of customers we produce documentation for, and while the structure is mostly the same, the formatting varies widely, so we store everything in a single EDD which is filtered to produce customer-specific element definitions. There are a whole load of other reasons we do it this way, including the need to maintain ~20 years backward compatibility for our oldest documents while still being able to add new features. I could go on, but I'll spare you. 

     

    So if I want to do a quick hotfix to a document, it's often easier – and always faster – to extract the element definitions, make the change, and then import element definitions once more. This leaves me free to do the actual fix in my copious free time.

     

    Thanks again for your response!

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement
    Using the community Terms of use Privacy Cookie preferences Do not sell or share my personal information ad choicesAdChoices