automatical sorting of glossary terms in fm8

[Guest]

terms in  glossary file were sorted manualy, but after translation they are  unsorted. is there any method to sort those glossary terms automatically?

thanks for help in advance

[Michael_Müller-Hillebrand]

Maluska,

The number 1 method is copy & paste … ugly, I know, especially since you (and I) may not know the alphabetic sorting rules of all languages. In the Scandinavian languages (da, sv, no, fi) some letters like Ä, Å, Ø sort after Z.

I have heard about methods to turn the glossary in a table and use FrameMaker’s table sorting feature. This works great if you have each term folowed by exactly the same number of paragraphs (usually one for this kind of trick). You would then select the glossary and transform it in a table, sort the table, and then turn the table into paragraphs again. Cons: I guess FM only knows english sorting, some FrameMaker versions killed hyper text markers when sorting a table, if you do not follow the constant # of paragraphs rule, your table will be a mess...

The most robust and complete solution is a script, that sorts according to your glossary term paragraph and takes with it all paragraphs following it. And the best thing, it could as well be teached to follow other sorting rules. A description of such a script can be found at http://www.i-frame.itl.info/ and it seems to do everything you ever need. It is not free, but they sell individual licenses, just ask.

- Michael

[peter minneapolis]

maluska19851019 wrote:

terms in  glossary file were sorted manualy, but after translation they are  unsorted. is there any method to sort those glossary terms automatically?

thanks for help in advance

If each glossary term is a single paragraph, and there are no definition paragraphs between terms, Special > List of > Name your list whatever, select the term paragraph format to be extracted, and choose alphabetic. The list will be alpha sorted by the rules of language specified for the paragraphs.

If each glossary term is a single paragraph, and there is a single definition paragraph between terms that uses a different paragraph format, change the Pagination property of the term paragraph to Run-In. This will join the definition to the end of the term paragraph, and the sorting will be by the term. Later, in the generated list, redefine the term paragraph to In-Column.

I haven't thought too much about the possibility that terms and/or definitions consist of multiple paragraphs. I think that run-in term paragraphs would concatenate in front of the first definition paragraph. I'm not sure how to handle multiple definition paragraphs to prevent them from concatenating with the following term paragraph. Perhaps insert one or two empty paragraph returns as placeholders between the last definition paragraph and the following term paragraph. Theoretically, this would concatenate the blank paragraph(s) to the end of the definition and not interfere with the following term. Later, use Find/Replace to delete the placeholder paragraphs.

HTH

Regards,

Peter

_______________________

Peter Gold

KnowHow ProServices