Skip to main content
MrsVJW
MrsVJW
Inspiring
October 29, 2010
Question

Search for Frames with a specific Tag name?

  • October 29, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 479 views

The current files are in Frame 8.0, we do also have Frame 9.0 (Windows) but haven't migrated over yet.

It seems like we might be having some file problems with Frame files where the main body text frame - usually named "A" and specified as such in all the Master Pages - is named "HIDDEN" in some files and we have problems when we are going through our steps to generate final documentation (our files are usually built as chapters with imbedded text insets to multiple files). 

Is there any way, even at the book level, to seach for frames by their tag name?  It would make it a lot easier than opening every file and trying to find these text frames.

Thanks!

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    1 reply

    Arnis Gubins
    Arnis Gubins
    Inspiring
    October 29, 2010

    What are you actually trying to do? The "HIDDEN" flow is usually the result of a conditional HIDE setting (i.e. that is the location where all of the tagged conditions that are hidden are moved to) and this text flow is never displayed via the FM interface. You can only find this flow using either a tool like FrameScript or editing the MIF version. Perhaps you simply need to set your conditions in those files to SHOW?

    Trying to edit things directly in this flow could seriously damage your document.

    MrsVJW
    MrsVJWAuthor
    Inspiring
    October 29, 2010

    I've only been at the current place a year, and a lot of the content we work with is from way before my time, and there have been several contractors who have come and gone (I know... all a recipe for hidden disasters in your Frame docs, but it is what it is).

    I suspect this started with the "HIDDEN" text frame becoming the body text frame in one document, and then through some copy/rename of files, it is worked its way into various other files before we caught that it was causing us some problems.

    None of our documents should be using show/hide for any hidden text.  We work mainly by importing multiple text insets into files.  The problems seem to happen when one of those text insets has the 'HIDDEN" tag name and we go to generate our final files and there are suddenly frames with two different names.  In all cases where I have seen a "HIDDEN" tag for a frame, the text in there should be the body text and not anything hidden.  If you open the Master Pages and then go back to the Body pages, you'll see that there are body page overrides.  There should not be - these are the "HIDDEN" frames that really should be the main body text frames.

    Saving as a MIF will also usually resolve the issue and the "HIDDEN" frame becomes "A", which is is supposed to be, or we'll end up with body pages with two text frames, and we need to delete the empty frames and usually rename the new body frame to "A" from "HIDDEN".

    I was just wondering if they was any way to search through files and look for text frames by their name/tag, so we could try to fix them at once, rather that having to wait until we run into it.  We're talking thousands of pages of text that comes from more thousands of imported text insets.  A single text inset with that "HIDDEN" tag may appear in multiple documents.  While it wouldn't seem a waste of effort to import individual files into a book just to do a search for this frame tag, it's pretty much out of the question to open each file that is a text inset (over 4000 text inset files that make up about 10,000 pages of docs) to check for this.

    If there is no way to search for the frame tag by name, we'll just continue to deal with it as it comes up.

    V
    Van Kurtz
    Inspiring
    October 29, 2010

    Based upon Arnis' point about a HIDDEN frame containing hidden conditialized text, you could try this.

    Create a new book file and add a modist number of the text inset files to the book, each as a file. Then in the book, select all of them and select Veiw > Show/Hide Conditional text. Select SHow All and click OK or whatever. This should cause all the conditionalized text in each file to be shown, thus removing all the content in each HIDDEN frame to the main body frame. It is still tedious but one command is applied to several files at once. Caveat: try it on a book with just a few files to see if it works.

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