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Daniel_F2
Inspiring
March 6, 2008
Question

Graphic bullets

  • March 6, 2008
  • 20 replies
  • 1944 views
Is there some way to replace the standard bullets (or replacement characters) with a small graphic - rather like you can in Word?

Another use for this is an emphasis leader, for example,

<Graphic> To fry an elephant:
1. Catch the elephant
2. Place in frying pan
...

The graphic and text following must be part of a paragraph tag. It should work much the same way as Frame Above Pgf or Below Pgf (neither of which are useful in this context).

What I'm really looking for are extensions/work arounds for
1. The non-existent "Frame Before Pgf" or "After Pgf"
2. The currently non-existent autonumber format, using a building block, which extracts something from a reference page.

You can of course use a 1x2 table with a graphic in the left cell and the text in the right. That's fine for notifications like Notes, Cautions, Warnings etc. but not for a bulleted list, which should "run" automatically at the end of each paragraph.
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    20 replies

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    Daniel_F2Author
    Inspiring
    March 19, 2008
    Thanks Arnis.

    You may have seen from my earlier posts that I "kinda got there". But the 0xaf thing is a surprise. I got the 0xd8 from the MS Character mapper.

    Oh, and by the way, after getting those wonderful little Windings into FM, I generated a pdf doc- which was fine, and then on to RoboHelp - and back to the little writing hand. Of course Dennis's link explains why, so I won't bother with another thread.

    DAniel
    _
    _Dennis_Brunnenmeyer_
    Participating Frequently
    March 18, 2008
    Hi..

    I have a couple of things to add, for what it's worth:

    1) I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the free plug-in RefIcons by Cudspan as a possible solution for Daniel's original question.

    2) Some words of wisdom (presumably) on using Wingdings can be found here: http://www.alanwood.net/demos/wingdings.html. I don't know if this site is up-to-date or not, but it seems very relevant to a portion of this thread.

    Dennis...
    D
    Daniel_F2Author
    Inspiring
    March 18, 2008
    The mystery continues:

    I refer to my post #14 above:

    If you generate MIF files for both a successful and unsuccessful case of inserting a Wingdings graphic as a bullet (again, I'm using 0xd8)and look at the hex for what shows up as the 0xd8 character, you get the following:

    Successful case: ef 83 98
    Unsuccessful case: c3 98

    I suspect that there is a Unicode issue lurking here.

    Dunno.
    Arnis Gubins
    Arnis Gubins
    Inspiring
    March 18, 2008
    Daniel,

    I'm not sure what you're doing but it works just fine on my systems.

    Try this after you've copied the 0xd8 bullet from Wingdings:

    1. Simple paste in FM8 (should come in as RTF) will show correctly as
    the Wingdings half-filled arrow.

    2. Paste Special as text, will insert the Oslash character (Ø). Now
    apply a character format that has Wingdings defined and it turns into
    the correct Wingding symbol. This is standard FM behaviour from the
    last century.

    3. Paste Special as Unicode text using the same procedure as in #2 and
    again you get the correct Wingdings symbol.

    The trick has always been to apply the character formatting to what
    you've pasted with any symbol or Pi type font.

    Now, if you want to use this as a bullet in a paratag, you have to
    insert the "Standard Character Set" hexcode value for this symbol,
    which happens to be \xaf (*not* \xd8), into the autonumber format
    dialog box for the paratag definition. Also apply the correct
    character format from the available list. The equivalent hexcodes are
    found in the Character_sets.pdf located in the \Documents folder of
    your FM8 installation.

    This is one of the more arcane issues with FM and I hope this helps.
    F
    FieryPantone
    Legend
    March 17, 2008
    Just some extra information for the Adobe engineers ;-} I had an FM 7.1 file where I used three "figure in circle" glyphs from Wingdings - 1, 2 and 3 - in callouts

    On the same PC, in the fulness of time, I opened this file in FM 8.0 ... and two of the three glyphs transformed themselves into the "writing hand". I then observed the same behaviour in other files promoted from FM 7.0 to FM 8.0.

    "It's a mystery"

    N
    D
    Daniel_F2Author
    Inspiring
    March 16, 2008
    I carefully repeated the above procedure on my "production" system this morning - and got it to work.

    Is anyone from FM support following this thread?

    End of discussion - for now anyway.

    Thanks to everyone who contributed.
    _
    _Philo_Calhoun_
    Known Participant
    March 16, 2008
    I don not know what is going on with FM8 and fonts, but I think it more likely that there is some bug in framemaker than one of the Adobe fonts bundled with ID3 or the microsoft fonts bundled with Office 2007 is defective. FM used to me my most stable application, but that changed with version 8. Sorry.
    D
    Daniel_F2Author
    Inspiring
    March 15, 2008
    Some further research:

    (I'm still on the second FM installation.)

    1. Open up MS Word, OpenOffice Writer and FM in turn.
    2. Start a new blank document
    3. Set the font to Windings, and size to (say) 36 pts, and doc size (say) to 100%.
    4. Type in:
    <space>0123456789
    ABCDEF .... XYZ
    abcdef .... xyz

    In each case you get identical results.
    5. For OO Writer and MS Word, use Insert to plonk in a 0xD8 arrow. That's fine.
    6. Just on a whim, I did a copy of the 0xd8 from MS Word and a paste special (unicode) to the open FM file - AND IT WORKED CORRECTLY! (It had NOT worked correctly on an earlier try.)
    7. I tried again to load Philo's example - but it still came out wrong!
    8. I opened up a FM book (the project that motivated all this), pasted the same 0xd8 character into my "To fry elephants" para tag's auto numbering panel and set the relevant character tag font to Wingdings.

    This time it worked, and the PDF was also correct.

    So what's changed?

    The only thing I could find was that fntchache.dat (deleted before my last reboot) had not "returned".

    It beats me!
    _
    _Philo_Calhoun_
    Known Participant
    March 14, 2008
    That is very strange. Just out of curiousity, if you make a pdf from FM yourself, does it print/display correctly? If so, I wonder if your wingdings font might be corrupted, as the one I sent you embeds the wingding font from my computer. I lost your address: pls resent email and I will send mif.
    D
    Daniel_F2Author
    Inspiring
    March 14, 2008
    You are correct.

    1. The PDF printed correctly.

    2. I loaded the FM file into FM on another system and got this: "Document named bullets.fm uses unavailable fonts.
    To reformat the document using available fonts, click OK"

    That's odd, since FM reports Wingdings etc. Of course if I do click OK, I get back to the 0x3f characters.

    3. On the second system, I deleted fntcache.dat, rebooted and tried again - with the same results.

    4. For what its worth, on both computers, I'm using FM 8 from the Tech Com Suite, fully patched, on a Win XP Pro system, also fully patched.

    5. Could you save bullets.fm as a MIF file and send it? I can then compare it with the MIF file I get here after allowing the reformat.
    _
    _Philo_Calhoun_
    Known Participant
    March 13, 2008
    Daniel: there must be some serious non FM font issue on your computer. I've sent a pdf from the FM. See if it displays correctly.
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