[Closed] FrameMaker 7.x/8 Feature Requests

Include one or more previously defined user variables as part of the definition of another user variable. For example:

You create a variable Custom A with a definition of:

ABC

You then define a variable CustomB with a definition of:

123<$CustomA>

When you insert the variable CustomB it appears as

123ABC

The larger a document gets with 10 or more Chapters and hundreds of graphics, the better chance for FrameMaker to crash if your system becomes unstable. When FrameMaker crashes it tries to create recovery files with your most recent changes. One problem is that there is no way to know which of the Recover files were saved before the crash and which ones were open.

When you reopen files through the book, you are forced to open each Recover file one at a time, To make these files useful, you must do a Save As for each file, rename them the same as the original name used in the book, do a Save All Files in Book, Close All files in Book, and then Open All Files in a Book.

A work around is to delete all file that contains ".recover" except the one you were working on when it crashed, before re-opening your book. Problem here is you better be sure that those files you deleted had been saved before the crash. Adobe suggests that you may also need to check your autosave files, assuming you selected Automatic Save in Preferences is checked.

What would save time when a crash occurs is options in FrameMaker to have button(s) available or some dialog box that opens that allows you to see the file date and time code of all files in the book when a Recover file is asked to be open, then it would allow you to be able to either delete the recover file and open the appropriate file, open an autosave file or use open the recover file.

Unless you experienced having 78 files in a book crash more than once a day due to McAfee VirusSan Enterprise software and network issues, one could see why this suggestion can only help a writer.

I'd like to see an enhancement to paragraph tab formtting so that a graph could be "side closest to binding" or "side furthest from binding" so that sideheads and scholar's margins could be set on either right or left pages automatically.

I think this would also require a change to master pages so that the sideheads area would be smart enough to also be "side closest" or "side furthest."

This would allow a new design paradigm where you'd have sholar's margins on the outsides of pages, rather than only on the left side of the page, as FM currently supports.

Art

I would like to see "window shade roll-up" features added to the Designer dialog windows. That is, if you double-click in the blue bar, the window would roll up like a window shade, showing only the blue bar with the name of the Designer. Double-clicking it again would pull the window back down so you could use it.

The Designer windows take up too much room on the screen, and it's a bigger pain to close them and then reopen them again from scratch.

Dennis Brunnenmeyer

I request the following two refinements to FrameMaker 7.2's File > File Info field entry process:

1. Make it so that entering a _comma_ in either the Author or Keywords fields no longer results in _quotation marks_ appearing around those entries in the resulting PDF's File > Document Properties corresponding fields. (A comma in the other fields fortunately does not result in quotation marks.)

I'm not sure how Keywords are intended to be entered (whether they might ever include a comma), but definitely an Author field might include a comma, such as ABC, Inc. This causes the resulting Author field in the PDF to be "ABC, Inc." with those unwanted quote marks.

2. Refine the File > File Info entry method for the scenario in which a book file is involved. The refinements should be that the user will no longer need to do any of the following user-UNintuitive steps that are apparently required in order to make the File > Field Info entries "take" (as opposed to stay as the previous File > Info entries, which can be a real problem):
2a. The user will no longer need to select the top line in the book file
2b. The user will no longer need to select all files in the book (Control+A) before selecting File > Info, to result in the needed radio box display and needed checkmarking of those radio boxes
2c. The user will no longer need to click "Save" after clicking "Set"

The user should be able to simply open the book file, select File > Info, type the entries, and click Set, with the resulting PDF displaying these latest "set" entries. That is how it works in the non-book scenario (no radio box display and checkmarking needed, no extra "Save" step needed). Or am I missing something about how users might be using/entering file information in the book situation?

Please describe the refined _steps_ needed in FrameMaker's Help on this book metadata topic (seen by searching for "Metadata"), instead of the current "you may want to..." narrative.

I wish Adobe would drag the UK English dictionary into the century of the computer. I just spell-checked a document using FM7.0 and the words I had to teach the dictionary included reboot, protocols, Internet and configure. None of these are exactly new or obscure, especially among FM's target audience.

Cheers, Rebecca

Hi,

I would love to see the zoom in and zoom out work the same way as other Adobe products (CTRL +) zooms in and (CTRL -) zooms out. I use FM, PhotoShop and Illustrator and the other two programs do this, but not FM.

Thanks
Don

Not to sidetrack the thread, but FM has always accommodated a different layout for the first page of a chapter and master page mapping in recent versions accommodates differing layouts for the last page and other pages within the document if you work it right.<br /><br />No need to continue this discussion here, if you need more info post in the forum.<br /><br />If you want more layout flexibility as a future enhancement, consider that understood. <g><br /><br />Cheers,<br /><br />Sean

Another thing I need : assign a different layout to the first and last page of a document. (Running heads are usually different on these page. Better even, let us decide that on specific layout will be affected to page n, so that we can automatically have different layouts affected to page 1, 2, 3, etc. I usually need first, second, third, current left, current right and last.

Even better : automatically choose a different layout for last page if it is nearly full or nearly empty.

I completely agree with what Chris said about shading paragraph. It is used to differentiate text flows. Frame text may be shaded to differentiate it from the main text flow. This improves the readability of the book, even if the readability of the characters may suffer a bit.

However, this is not the reason why I need : I need shaded paragraphs because my customers ask for it. No questions ! I have the choice to :

- manually put shaded box behind the text : cumbersome to lay out and won't flow when text changes.

- use tables : problems because because it a real table floats to the next page, a shaded paragraph which appears after the table in the text will be laid out after the table, even if there is room at the bottom of the page, where normal paragraphs would go.

- use anchor frames containing text frames : the ideal way to go (allowing multicolumn boxed text) if the frame could resize automatically when text is added or removed. As this is not possible, I have to resize the frames manually. Also, the text cannot be imported directly and formatted simply with a style. I have to cut the text, create the frames and past the text in them.

- create a plugin to automatically put a shaded box behind specific paragraph. This is simple and efficient. The only problem is that it is not dynamic. If the text change, I have to remove the boxes and put them again. As this is a matter of less than a hundred line of C code, it would probably not cost much to had it to FrameMaker.

By the way, there are other functionnalities I need in FrameMaker, although as I have implemented them as plugins, I do not need to ask for them, although I think it might be useful to others, for example :

- make a paragraph on line shorter or one line longer

- justify the last line of a paragraph

- make selected text fit on one line

- allow specific last line right indent (the same as first line left indent). This is needed in table of contents when title are broken on several lines. Without it, one have to cut lines manually.

- make possible to allow/disallow page or column breaks between table of content and index entries based on context : do no break after a level one is it is followed by a level two, do not break before the last level 2, etc.

- make possible to update only the page numbers in table of contents and indexes. This is needed when some manual changes have been made to the index or table text and would be lost if the text in generated again.

I have dozens of other suggestions that are all based on things I have to do manually that FrameMaker could to for me !