Search and Replace on master pages

Thanks Thomas and Riley

Riley, we must do this often but it is always with another kind of book. The English books are coming from Japan or Belgian Technical Writers. The English books are always good, the headers are right.
But when we send the books to an translation office, they don't know how to exactly translate the headers. It's a productcode that changes per language.

Thomas, good idea, we haven't thought to do this. It's faster than what we did, thanks!

If there are some persons with better ideas, let me know please!

Regards
Sander Gheldof

You don't give much details, but wouldn't it simply be
possible to import master pages throughout the book?
Put what you want in one file's master pages and then import.

--
/Thomas Michanek

Thanks for your help...but the headers aren't variables...

It may be that your solution is to bite the bullet today and do the page-by-page change of your headers to variables.

System header variables can, for example, contain text from a paragraph style such as a level-[ 1 | 2 | 3...] heading. Or other values received from a FrameMaker named paragraph style.

User-defined variables can also be used in headers and footers, although they can't be made to do the zippy automatic things system header/footer variables do...

The essential point being that after doing it the hard way today, you may never need to do it again tomorrow. Or, alternatively, subsequent changes can be effected by changing the value of the variable and importing that into the desired target chapter files...

Cheers & hope this helps,
Riley

Sander,

FrameScript is (or should be) part of most Frame shop's toolkit.

And there are a number of script writers around who can turn this script in a few minutes for you (Rick Quatro - frameexpert@truevine.net is my fave).

So your choice is to save money by creating a reusable tool for not much cash, or spend more money in time and man-hours doing it manually.

Cheers,
Art

Thanks for your help Peter but the headers aren't variables...

We know how to fix it if they were variables but they aren't...

Maybe we must do it manually...

I'm not sure if you want to change the running header/footer variable definition from something like:

<$paratext[Header1]>

to

<$paratext[Header2]>

for all chapters in the book.

If this is you need, and all variable definitions in all files are identical, you can redefine the variable in one file and use File > Import > Formats, deselect all options, and select only Variable Definitions to import the definitions from this file to all files in the book.

See the Help topic on importing formats for details.

HTH

Regards,

Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices

Sander,

If you save the file(s) in MIF format, then you can use any text
editor (including FM when opening with the Shift key) to do you search
and replace.

So, you think it isn't possible in FrameMaker...

Anyone with other suggestions?

Regards
Sander

Write or purchase a FrameScript...

Art