[Closed] FrameMaker 7.x/8 Feature Requests

Report · Aug 19, 2002

Time to start entering these. If you are unsure about whether FM has the feature yet, please do some research and figure it out before posting.

Please don't post requests for assistance in here, either.

Cheers,

Sean

Report · Oct 12, 2002

Print Preview window? A much needed feature - it's frustrating having to actually print out docs just to see how they will look in print.

Report · Oct 12, 2002

What do you find surprising about your printed output? I mean, what prints differently than you expect?

Cheers,

Sean

Report · Oct 12, 2002

Frame displays fonts much differently than they appear in print (PDF or hardcopy). Images also appear extremely blurry and grainy in Frame, but can suprisingly print very clean, or even worse than they appear in Frame. When I see this odd behavior, I usually have to print PDF or a hardcopy sample to ensure content displays correctly.

Report · Oct 14, 2002

Sean,

Print Preview (in Word) saves paper! It's also great for checking that documents prepared for double-sided printing align correctly.

It would have the same advantages in FM.

Report · Oct 14, 2002

The only time you might ever see a difference between print and screen
is if you leave the FM maker.ini setting for
DisplayUsingPrinterMetrics to the default value of "Off". It is highly
recommended to change this to "On".

Report · Oct 14, 2002

Oh, I just change the zoom in FrameMaker to see the alignment of printed pages. My fonts don't really change that much between screen and print--I mean, clearly, screen is lower res, so there are going to be some differences, but because print preview is to screen, also, it doesn't overcome the screen shortcomings. Of course, printing (to PDF) is one way to view your output, especially for EPS files, and rasters will print differently than they display--again, a resolution thing. But, I know what my rasters look like on-screen and print like, given a particular res.

So, there are no advantages to print preview for me. YMMV.

Cheers,

Sean

Report · Oct 14, 2002

Print Preview is not going to tell you anything unless:

1. You are using the same driver and PPD as your default printer that your final deliverable will be printed with.

2. You have a NASA-strength monitor with infinite resolution capability so you can really see a 600 dpi image (or 1200 dpi, or...) on-screen, and see your fonts in print-quality on-screen. *lol*

The most common font error people run into when using FM is not using the target printer as their default when authoring in FM. For example, you use a print vendor for publishing, and they use a Docutech for production, but you are authoring with your office's HP DeskJet as your default printer. If you're trying to do prepress layout on your local machine, you should be using the target printer (even if set up as a virtual printer for the sake of layout and proofing) as your default.

Printing to PS and distilling to PDF will give you EXACTLY what your target production printer will (except in electronic form). You can proof it on-screen. Image quality will not be exact because you ARE proofing on-screen, and printing it out on your DeskJet won't give you an exact rendering of your production quality either, as the output from a DeskJet is very different from that of a production-quality printer.

Basically, if you need a hard proof, you should request one from your print vendor. If you need an electronic one, the best you can get is a PDF (set up as needed and created using your print vendor's driver and PPD).

That said, a Print Preview option would be useless to anyone doing production-quality work. Even if it was capable of showing you the layout just as well as a PDF, you are the only audience for the print preview. If you wanted to share the proof with anyone else, you'd have to go with PDF anyway, as you can't distribute a Print Preview.

Report · Oct 14, 2002

Two parts to this.

1. I would use Print Preview strictly to see that my facing pages line up the way I want, and also to avoid bad page breaks, WITHOUT WASTING PAPER. I don't try to read the text. And don't get me started on changing Zoom sizes. Not real user friendly, IMHO.

2. Could the Find and Find/Replace features be refined such that they tell you when you've reached the end of what you selected to search, instead of recycling until you finally notice that's what they are doing?

Report · Oct 14, 2002

>And don't get me started on changing Zoom sizes. Not real user friendly

There's no magnifying glass, but I don't see how Print Preview would present a friendlier solution; print preview would involve more clicks.

>WITHOUT WASTING PAPER

Nobody has suggested you waste paper.

>2.

Yeah, that can be a pain. At a minimum, you have to cycle through the FM twice before moving on to the next chapter. Quite an annoyance.

Cheers,

Sean

Report · Oct 14, 2002

Horace,

How is that different than authoring in FM using a 2-up view, or using a PDF with a 2-up view? (Arnis made an excellent suggestion above, which will give you what you are looking for - IN FRAMEMAKER - providing you are using the correct printer for your needs as your default printer.)
Yes, a pain.

Report · Oct 14, 2002

Bill, it's different in two ways.

First, print preview would require more clicks.

Second, you cannot make changes in print preview, so you'd have to keep bouncing around between editing and print previewing.

Cheers,

Sean

Report · Oct 14, 2002

Sean,

You got me. I wasn't thinking in terms of generating more work for myself.

My bad.

:OP

Report · Oct 14, 2002

Bill,

How do I author in Frame with a 2-up view?
The pdf thing works, but then you have to go back, fix it, then re-pdf it.

Report · Oct 14, 2002

Horace,

View > Options... select from the Page Scrolling list: "Facing Pages".
Then zoom out to about 75% and you should have a full-spread print
preview in FM.

Report · Oct 14, 2002

Zoom out to get a 2-up view.

Report · Oct 14, 2002

Zoom out even further to get 3-up, 4-up, 5-up, etc...

Report · Oct 14, 2002

I'll stop at 2-up. Thanks.

Report · Oct 15, 2002

Thanks.

Report · Oct 21, 2002

"View just this graphic" - check one graphic in situ without having to load every image in the document.

Report · Oct 21, 2002

Didn't mean to get drawn into this huge thread, but had to reply to message 108 "you cannot make changes in [Word's] Print Preview." That is not true -- as you use Print Preview to look for bad page breaks, etc., you can click the mag. glass, then the page, to see details of a page. Next, you can click the mag. glass "off," and make any edits you desire. Very handy for checking/fixing facing-pages, widows, etc. problems, and to get a "warm fuzzy" that your pages are really ready to go. I'd welcome it in Frame.

Report · Oct 22, 2002

Two big ones:

1. Alter find-and-replace so that you can find marker text and replace the text within the marker rather than replacing the entire ^&$^ marker with your replacement text.

2. A reporting feature that allows me to see (on the book level) what paragraph and character formats are defined in a book, and which chapters use which formats.

(Yes, I'm aware there are third-party tools available. I've test-driven SYSTEC's Toolbox 7 free, but can't tell if their Toolbox Package 1 does this)

Report · Oct 22, 2002

You could use IX gen for item number 1.

Report · Oct 25, 2002

With Microsoft's new XDocs documents, based on XML, in Office.Net, can we expect seamless integration when moving documents between Word.Net and the next version of FrameMaker? XML seems to be at the heart of both applications, since it is the future of publishing, the web and information exchange. Maybe if we save documents as XML files? Perhaps XDocs will work with Frame 7's current XML support?

Report · Oct 28, 2002

I'd like to add to my vote to the discussion about spell checking on the fly. Word does this really nicely--you can see immediately if you've misspelled something. Would be nice to see in FM, if it could be done without compromising core functionality.

Report · Oct 28, 2002

>I'd like to add to my vote to the discussion about spell checking on the fly. Word does this really nicely--you can see immediately if you've misspelled something. Would be nice to see in FM, if it could be done without compromising core functionality.

It'd be nice if Microsoft fixed this feature so it would actually work with long technical documents. This feature actually fails on documents over 250-ish pages with graphic and xrefs, etc. The error message says the document is too complex for on-the-fly spell chucking. (P4 2GHz 512MB RAM 80 GB HDD, 40GB free).

Cheers,

Sean