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Two-fer
Two-fer
Inspiring
April 10, 2023
Answered

Soft Return Behavior Change in FM22 (Windows 11, Unstructured FM)

  • April 10, 2023
  • 1 reply
  • 1345 views

I have leveraged a lot of FM files from my Japanese parent company over the past 22 years, and they have a habit of using soft returns (SHIFT+ENTER) to maintain the same indentation formatting from one paragraph to the next. For example, if the original paragraph has a bullet point, using a soft return will make the next line have the same indent without the bullet point. This results in fewer Paragraph formats. (I’m not saying I agree with that approach…)

In addition, they use full justification for all their paragraphs.

 

This was all fine and dandy until I upgraded from FM 2020 (16) to FM22 (17). Now all the words in the last line of a fully justified paragraph followed by a soft return are spaced across the entire width (see below).

Before Upgrade to FY22:

 

After Upgrade to FM22:

 

In the Paragraph Designer I tried adding a checkmark to the ‘Advance’-->"Allow Automatic Letter Spacing," but that didn’t help—all it seemed to do was add more space between each of the letters in each word.

 

If anyone can come up with a quick fix (aside from removing the full justification setting—that must be maintained), it would be most appreciated. (It takes about an hour to manually remove all the soft returns from a single manual, and I have another 8~10 manuals to go….)

 

Thanks!

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Two-fer

    Hi,

     

    In FrameMaker 2022 there is a new feature about the right indentation of the last line of a paragraph:

    https://help.adobe.com/en_US/framemaker/using/index.html#t=using-framemaker%2FFrameMaker-2022%2Fuser-guide%2Ffm-whats-new-gm.html%23fm-whats-new-gm

    Possibly this new feature also causes a change in your issue.

     

    And I found this post, which might be related to your issue. Possibly this helps.

    https://community.adobe.com/t5/framemaker-discussions/forced-return-is-now-justified/m-p/13394315

     

    Your soft returns are at the end of text which should be a paragraph.

    With your soft return, FrameMaker justifies the non-last line. Therefore this is correct behavior.

    Although it is some work, I think it is best to search for the soft returns (\n) and replace them with nothing or with \p or \P to start a new paragraph.

     

    Best regards

     

    Winfried


    Thank you! That link provided the answer (someone else asked the same question but used different terminology so I didn't find it when I searched for it before.) The following fixed it! (But I did remove all the soft returns from my standard files so I don't have to deal with this again.)

     

     

    1 reply

    Jeff_Coatsworth
    Community Expert
    Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    April 10, 2023

    That seems like a bug - are you all patched up in FM2022? Is it behaving that way in a brand new document too? Is there anything else going on in those lines you show? You don't have the text symbols turned on, so it's hard to tell. Have you tried using Find and Replace to change them out?

    Two-fer
    Two-ferAuthor
    Inspiring
    April 10, 2023

    Thanks for responding!

    Yes, I am all patched up. 

    I just checked, and yes, it does the same thing in a brand new document (I typed in new text instead of copying from an existing document). See below.

    'Text symbols' is turned on--but the 'Soft Return' symbol won't display if the text is justified (though it did in FM2020). If I remove the justification, the 'Soft Return' symbol is then displayed: 

    I don't see a Find setting that would find a soft return... 

    Two-fer
    Two-ferAuthor
    Inspiring
    April 10, 2023

    As an aside, is there a reason why I cannot see my own question on the forum when I look at 'All Discussions'? Obviously others can see my questions, but I never can....  

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