FM 8 Printing to PDF generates bad filenames. Why?

[7653487]

I'm using Framemaker 8 on Windows XP.

I have a book with about thirty chapters, making a total of something like 1100 pages.

I have updated the book, generated TOC and Index files, and need to print it to a set of PDF files, one PDF per chapter.

But when I do this, all the PDF files are badly named. Instead of being named Chapter_1.pdf, Chapter_2.pdf, etc. they are named BookTitle(Chapter_1.pdf, BookTitle(Chapter_2.pdf, etc.

I know that I've managed to generate files with the correct names in the past, and I've been trying all afternoon to figure out how I did it. Nothing in the dialogs seems to control this naming behaviour... What's doing it? And more importantly, how can I fix it?

K

[Arnis Gubins]

In the Print dialogue, make certain that you use only an asterisk "*" as the filename to print to file and then run Distiller on the .ps files.

[7653487]

Thanks, Arnis, for that idea.

Printing to PostScript files in a watched folder, then allowing Distiller to convert them to PDF works, and maintains the cross references between chapters.

I'm not marking this as answered, yet. Your idea has allowed me to  generate my PDF chapters and get on with my publishing, but hasn't explained why FrameMaker made such a spectacular mess of naming the PDF files...

The fact that the Print to PDF in FrameMaker fails is a very annoying bug.It makes this feature totally useless for me. I don't remember this being a problem in previous versions, though the last time I needed to regularly generate PDFs from books was several years ago, working in a different company on a different continent and running FrameMaker on Solaris.

I just went back and looked at my book more carefully; in fact it has  more like 100 chapters, plus an index, a TOC and frontmatter. Many  chapters contain cross-references to other chapters; these are broken  when FrameMaker generates PDF files with bad names (in the format I  described in my first post).

K.

[Arnis Gubins · Accepted solution]

K.

The "*" technique is the old, standard way of doing this. Notice that in FM8, the Print dialogue has an extra line that asks whether to print the book as separate files or one file. This is a new feature introduced with FM8 and it unfortunately, uses the Book name as part of the naming convention.

Another BAD (broken as designed) feature...