deviousness required to control volnum

Report · Jan 11, 2011

Just before hitting "Post message" I had an idea ... which seems to have worked, but I'd still like to run it by for approval!

When I worked from the .book file, every attempt to set volnum to "continue from previous" and "Roman" was thwarted
When I (incorrectly) worked from the chapter file, it worked just until I regenerated the ToC – then FM took over and Knew Better, a trait normally associated with a certain popular word-processor.

My aha! moment made me select even the chapter-files where $volnum wasn't used: once all the chapters were set to "use previous $volnum", I was able to override one of the them with "continue". Satisfactory end result, but I didn't expect to have to set things I wasn't using. What have I been missing?

Report · Jan 12, 2011

Niels,

When I worked from the .book file, every attempt to set volnum to "continue from previous" and "Roman" was thwarted

I do not know what you mean by "thwarted."

I never use volnum, but I opened one of my books, selected the first file in the book, and selected Numbering. The dialog defaulted to Volume #1, numeric. I changed it to Roman and closed the dialog. I set the second file's volume number to Continue, the third to Same As Previous, and the fourth to Continue.

I then went back and selected Numbering for the first file and the dialog showed Volume #1 (ROMAN), the second file showed Volume #2 (ROMAN), the third showed Volume #2 (ROMAN), and the fourth Volume #3 (ROMAN).

NOTE that in the dialog box, volume, chapter, page, etc numbers always display as Arabic, even though the format maybe be ROMAN or roman or whatever. To my knowledge, only Text displays the actual text.

So, my FrameMaker seems to be working exactly as it should.

Report · Jan 21, 2011

• "thwarted" is "prevented from doing something" – sometimes I get too annoyed by a FM problem to keep an eye on my vocabulary As I said, I worked out the problem arose because I didn't (at first) explicitly set a behaviour for $volnum in files where I wasn't using it. Changing that solved the problem, and cheered me up for the day. It's no fun being thwarted ... ;-}

Report · Jan 21, 2011

Niels,

I didn't (at first) explicitly set a behaviour for $volnum in files where I wasn't using it.

You are always using it, even though your document does not reference it. That is, even if you are not using $volnum anywhere in your book, it IS set to something for each document in the book, if just the defaults.

Van