? at the beggining of each line of TOC when I save to pdf?

[Guest]

When I save a Framemaker 11 file to pdf I get a question mark inside of the > character at the beginning of each line of the generated table of contents in the pdf file. I have done everything that I can think of and can't get rid of it.

[Bob_Niland]

What is the "> character" ?

What you're describing sounds like your TOC format construct is calling for a character glyph that is missing from the font used.

[Guest]

Not having any success pasting a screen capture for this problem.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Use the camera icon in the web interface of the forum

[Guest]

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Is this the FM file we're seeing or the PDF? If it's the FM file, then I would ask where the source content came from - it looks like you've got some imported cruft from Word or something like that...

[Guest]

This Framemaker 11 file. Previously I was using Framemaker 8

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Where did the content come from? Have you tried MIF-washing the file?

[Guest]

The file was ceated using the master and reference pages that were used in my framemaker 8 files. No content other that framemaker generated. When you say MIR-washing I assume you mean saving to the MIF format. I tried that, but it didnt seem to help, but then again I tried so many different things that I am no longer sure. I will try that again.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Maybe it’s a character in a font that you don’t have installed anymore?

[Guest]

That was the next thing I was going to try – changing the font. The font used was Calibri and was one that was actually loaded after the file was created. I changed the pervious font to the new Calibri.

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

Go to your reference page, remove the tab character at the beginning of the entry for that para tag, and instead adjust the left margin. You may also have to remove the initial tab stop that is no longer used, and update the para tag.

Let us know if the cruft still occurs when there is nothing to the left of the <$paratext> entry.

[Guest]

I've removed everything, first the tabs and it is still there, then even the refernce pages and it is still there.

[Mike Wickham]

Are you saying that the character appears fine in the FM file, but

changes to a question mark in the PDF when you generate it?

[Guest]

The question mark character appears in the Framemaker 11 file as a ? inside of a right arrow (>) key, I the pdf only the ? appears.

Framemaker file

pdf file

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

So you still have a tab entered at the beginning of the line. The > represents the invisible tab character entered on the ref page.

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

Try setting up a test environment...

Create one or more new docs

Link them with a book

Create a TOC

By looking at default behavior, you'll be able to figure out what's wrong in your setup.

BTW, you could also simply start fresh with a TOC2, and define formatting as needed.

Sorry to step out of the discussion, but I have billable work to get done. Have you looked thru the help for Fm, or looked at a ref book like mine yet?

-Matt

Matt R. Sullivan
co-author Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 11

[Guest]

Thanks for you help!

[Mike Wickham]

The right angle bracket is FrameMaker's way of representing the

invisible tab character. That's why it only shows in FM, not the PDF.

You can use Alt v s to toggle display of invisible characters. It's

usually best to leave them turned on.

The question mark is FrameMaker's way of displaying a character that

does not exist in your current font. For example, you might choose a

character to use as a bullet for each item in a list. If you later

change the paragraph to use a font that does not have that character

defined, FrameMaker can no longer display it and shows you a question

mark instead.

So I think you need to look for that character in your file and replace

it with something that will display. If it displays in FM, it should

display in the PDF. Right now, it's displaying in neither. There are two

places I can think of to look for it:

1. Choose the affected paragraph format-- for example, Heading 1-- and

look in its autonumbering properties. Someone may have assigned a

character there. If this was meant to be a bullet, insert the bullet

building block in place of whatever is there now.

2. The other place to look is on the file's reference page (Esc v R).

This is where you set up how FM content displays in generated files.

Here, the paragraph format might be called Heading1TOC, for example.