Last Paragraph rule broken?

Even though the WYSIWYG environment is one of the major reasons to use FM, it does enforce restrictions on the context specifications that are practical. If it were possible to test an arbitrary sibling instead of just the immediately preceding and immediately following ones, then each change of an element or attribute could trigger reformatting of very large portions of a document and performance would be unacceptably slow. Hence FM does not allow the kind of testing you want.

The run-in head approach that you now plan was one of two I would have suggested as an alternative. I cringe a bit at the other one, because it is not WYSIWYG. Also, I don't know if it fits into the environment in which these documents will be used. The idea is to have two forms of each document, an editing form and a publishing form. Users edit the document, unsurprisingly, using the editing form which makes no attempt to turn the last paragraph red. As each draft is complete, the user saves the document as XML, using an application that runs XSLT to set an attribute on those paragraphs that should be red. XSLT does not have the same performance restrictions as FM; it has no need to keep up with real-time manipulations of the document. Furthermore, it is straightforward to do the kind of testing you need in XSLT. The XSLT output is the XML version of the publishing form of the document. Opening this XML document back in FrameMaker will trigger the desired formatting from the attribute value. You could use the FDK or FrameScript to automate the save and re-open. If you do, you can have some naming convention that derives the filename of the publishing form from that of the original document and even makes it read-only to prevent the user from accidentally editing the wrong version of the file.

--Lynne

Can you get the desired formatting if you replace the all-contexts rule on Chunk with a context rule on Para that tests for the context "{before Marker}"?

FYI, FM 8 behaves the same way in this regard as previous versions.

First and last paragraph rules apply to the first or last content in an element when that content consists of a FrameMaker paragraph. It would be misleading to call them "first/last element rules" instead because this content need not be in an element. Suppose, for example, that a list item can contain an example surrounded by text. The result might be three paragraphs within the item, but only one subelement. Besides, as you've noted, the rule won't apply to the last element if that element is not a paragraph.

--Lynne