Date, Time and Duration (structured FM2022)

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

A completely 'random' question to the community.

I'm writing a novel using FrameMaker. To keep track of events, I would like to add the Date, Time and Duration for each event in the novel, akin to this:

It is not part of the 'printable' content, so need to appear 'outside' the normal text frame. 

I know I can create it as a Text Flow B, with the relevant elements for Date, Time, DOW and Duration, and manually enter these, then use Conditional Formatting to hide these when creating the final output. I also know that FrameMaker can't do calculations, e.g. add the duration to the Time to populate the End Time, using that as the Time for the next event.

I'm sure others in the community have done something similar for other projects/documents and was wondering how this was achieved?

Thoughts, suggestions, ideas welcome.

Thanks,

Quintin

[Bob_Niland]

The spotting of this metadata can be in Anchored Frames, Outside Column, taking up the full margin width. The text within would be in Text Frames in the AFs, optionally as Tables. Being anchored, they move with the text flow. I use the Table variant of this hack for spot cross-references. The frames, tables and text are all set to color "Authoring", which is switched to Invisible (not white) for publication, via Color Views.

Body text anywhere in the document can Xref this meta content (by $paratext or entire cells), and the Xrefs, as hypertext, work whether the meta is visible or not.

For picking up the date data, not instant insight. It obviously could be scripted. Does OLE still work in FM?

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

@Bob_Niland The through of using an Anchored frame is a good suggestion. I can add it as a 'possible' element in my EDD - I use something similar to create Dropcaps. 

[Lynne A. Price]

Quintin,

    One option is to put the extra information in a side head. That way it would not occupy space in the main column and would flow with the associated content as you edit.

     As you mentioned, you can make the text conditional. Alternatively you can just change it's text color to white to hide it.

    I assume you are using structured FrameMaker for editing, which brings up various options. For example, if you are using XSLT in your structured FM work, but have not learned how to write scripts, you can save the file as XML and then open the result, using XSLT in one direction to calculate the time differences.

   Are you going to give us any tantalizing hints about the genre or plot of the story?

        --Lynne

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

@Lynne A. Price I haven't delved into using XML or XSLT - just standard stuctured FM. There isn't really much space either side of the text frame for side heads, but Bob's suggestions about an Anchored frame could potentially work.

As for hints about genre and plot... I can't give away much as I'm still on the first draft, but I will say that it's the third in my 'who-dunnit' series (https://www.quintinseegers.com/books.html) and my main character finds herself in the company of a supposed man-eating lion. 

[Bob_Niland]

Some of my margin frames contain rotated text frames to accomodate longer text strings.

[4everJang]

Well, as long as it turns out to be only a man-eating lion, she should have nothing to fear... 

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

Disregarding that 'man' here doesn't refer to gender but (hu)man, your comment nonetheless elicited a chuckle 🙂

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

Make than man(kind), rather than (hu),man.

[Lynne A. Price]

Quintin,

   There are various other ways to hide your notes. Possibilities include sideheads on a wider paper size, links to a separate file, conditional footnotes, markers (from which you can generate a list of markers that link back to the original document). I'm sure there are many others.

    Also, to calculate time differences, you can set up the time information in a way that let's you open it in a spreadsheet, from which you can calculate elapsed time.

    --Lynne

    --Lynne

[frameexpert]

Can you post a screenshot of your structure where you want an event to appear? Are you adding something in your structure to indicate that a margin event note should appear? Thanks.

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

@frameexpert Not sure I follow what you're asking. At this stage I'm not adding anything to my structure. I'm interested to know how others in the community have achieved something similar, or suggest possible ways in which it can be achieved.

[frameexpert]

I was looking to see if you had some kind of a "trigger" in your structure that would indicate where a note should appear and its data. I have been thinking about your idea and I think I would approach it similar to what I did with table change bars (https://community.adobe.com/t5/framemaker-discussions/table-changebars/td-p/14036602). I would prompt for the data and put a static text frame next to the paragraph containing the insertion point. The text frame would be tied to the paragraph internally by the paragraph's id. That way, if the document reflows, you could use a command to reset the positions.

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

@frameexpert I don't have any 'triggers' - I prefer to avoid any sort of scripts purely because I prefer to use the functionality that ships with the product - not to say that I won't use scripts if unavoidable.

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

I ended up using a Table as I had better control over its content than with an Anchored frame:

Hiding borders and text symbols:

Showing borders and text symbols:

I've also added an Attribute at the Book level to change the status which in turns changes the colour of the text in the table.

[QuintinSeegers_Personal]

In case someone wonders about the language as it doesn't quite appear to be Dutch - it's actually Afrikaans 🙂 (though it will be available in English as well)