Can you have bookmarks within an fm document and other beginner questions?

[Guest]

Hi,

I've just taken a Framemaker evaluation with the aim of speeding up pdf and html generation, as I currently

use a single-source tool developed in-house.  I last used Framemaker  when it was version 6 and I have

quite a few questions about things I would like to be able to do:

Can I view bookmarks within a standard framemaker document, as in Word? I find this makes it easier to

navigate around the documentation, or is there a better way? I know about setting them in the PDF, this

is for me as the author...

I've just got the hang of autonumbering again, but haven't found out/understood how to keep my figure captions

with the images that I have imported into an anchored frame,so  any help you can give me would be appreciated

with this.

PDF output is great and the speed of saving is great even for large documents. Is there any real advantage to

having lots of several chapters in a book, rather than just one long document? My longest document is around

280 pages and consists of four sections, with an appendix, glossary, toc and index.

HTML output appears to be as bad a I remembered it from 6 years ago, when I used Webworks Publisher to

perform the conversion. Is RoboHelp a good alternative? I have organized an evaluation starting from next week

so haven't had a chance to look at this yet, but would be interested in what people think.

Many thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers,

Karen

[peter minneapolis · Accepted solution]

AKACB wrote:

Hi,

I've just taken a Framemaker evaluation with the aim of speeding up pdf and html generation, as I currently

use a single-source tool developed in-house.  I last used Framemaker  when it was version 6 and I have

quite a few questions about things I would like to be able to do:

Can I view bookmarks within a standard framemaker document, as in Word? I find this makes it easier to

navigate around the documentation, or is there a better way? I know about setting them in the PDF, this

is for me as the author...

Hi, Karen:

In FrameMaker documents, you can navigate from something that will become a link in a PDF to its source, with a "hyperclick" on TOC and index page entries in generated files, and cross-references, or hyperlinks in ungenerated documents. A hyperclick is Ctrl+Alt+Click. There's no return click. You can lock FrameMaker documents to make these links active with a single click, and use the Back and other commands on the Navigation menu that appears when a locked document is active.

To lock or unlock a document for hypertext navigation type and release these keys in sequence: Escape F (must be uppercase) l (lowercase "el" not capital "eye" or number one) k (must be lowercase.) I remember it as "(F)ile (l)oc(k)."

Search Google for terms like "FrameMaker lock documents for hypertext" and "FrameMaker navigation menu" without quotes, for more info on these techniques.

Also, you can use the insert cross-reference dialog box to scan through a sort of file outline, by selecting a paragraph format such as a heading, on the left, and scrolling through those paragraphs on the right. The page numbers you see below the list indicate the first and last page of the paragraphs in the list above. It's a little inexact, but helpful.

You can also generate TOC or index or list of external cross references (Special > List of > References > External Cross-References), then narrow the generated file's window so it fits in the workspace alongside the active document. Hyperclick on an in the generated files, or lock the files and single click on an entry, to navigate to the linked location in whatever file is points to.

HTH

Regards,

Peter

_______________________

Peter Gold

KnowHow ProServices

[Guest]

Hi Peter,

Many thanks for the speedy response to the navigation part of my question, I'll try this out tomorrow.

Best wishes,

Karen

[Guest]

Hi Peter,

That works perfectly-many thanks for your help.

Best wishes,

Karen

[Arnis Gubins]

Karen,

To keep your graphics and captions together, I would recommend that you use a uniquely created paragraph tag for anchoring the graphics and then use the Keep with Next property to have it stay with the caption paragraph.

I would always recommend to keep your documentation as smaller sets of files and use the book function to keep things together. This keeps things simpler in component sections, like the TOC, Index, glossary, etc. where you may have differing page designs and tags. It makes it easier to change things (design and tagging), to re-use content, to re-arrange the order of sections, chapters, etc. It also makes you less vulnerable to a file corruption messing up your entire document set.

If you don't have the TechComm Suite, then for creating HTML output (and many other formats) from FM, check out Omni Systems mif2go product at http://www.omsys.com/dcl/mif2gopg.htm

[Guest]

Hi Arnis,

I've got my images now linked to their figure captions and will have a look at Omni Systems mif2go for

html creation as well.

I'm working on a trial document of just 26 pages during our FM evaluation, but after purchase will make sure that

longer documents are kept in separate sections.

Many thanks for your help.

Best wishes,

Karen