FM9 - transparency from PPT

[_Giulietta_]

Hi Everyone -
We're considering whether to upgrade to FM9 or InDesign, now that ID can do cross-refs and indexing.

One of the reasons I've been against FM is that when we put graphics in our manuals, we link them from PPT slides so that they update live whenever changes are made to the slides. This always works perfectly unless the slide contains transparency. In which case, the transparent part of the graphic PDFs as an opaque square, regardless of the actual shape of the object.

When we've contacted Adobe about this in the past, we've been told that FM doesn't support transparency. I can't seem to find where transparency support is a major addition to FM9...can anyone tell me if it has been addressed in this latest version?

Thank you!

[_Kenneth_Benson_]

Indesign won't import PowerPoint slides, won't use any OLE at all. It
does support transparency, but to get your slides into Indesign, you'd
have to print them to PDF.

--
Kenneth Benson
Pegasus Type, Inc.
www.pegtype.com

[Art Campbell]

And 9 is supposed to support OLE, although I personally wouldn't trust it because of Microsoft's benign neglect.

But if you download the FM 9 or TCS2 eval, you should have an answer pretty quickly.

BTW, FM does support some kinds of transparency in graphics now, but I think trying to get it working within OLE ... I don't know.

Art

[Seanb_us]

PowerPoint is a content dead end. Try importing it into Word, for example.

How about this approach:

1) Write your content in FrameMaker.
2) Set up one FrameMaker layout for print.
3) Set up a second FrameMaker layout for presentations.
4) Use conditions to manage which content goes to print and which goes to presentations.

Use PDF to deliver the presentations, not PPT.

Cheers,

Sean

[FieryPantone]

I'd heartily concur with Sean's suggestion! or if you're stuck with Powerpoint, you could try creating the graphics in a graphics tool and then [deep breath] linking them to Powerpoint and importing by reference into Framemaker.

Be aware, of course, that if linked graphics in Powerpoint are kin to linked graphics in Word there will be days when you open a document and find they have all have fled to some picture heaven ...

[_Giulietta_]

Thanks for all the replies!

I heartily concur with Sean's suggestion too! If it was up to me, we would have been doing it Sean's way a long time ago. Now that our IT dept is rolling out SP3, it's breaking things we do in FM7 (like linking to PPT). So my prospects of implementing a change are looking up!

In the mean time, FM9 upgrade is a more viable opportunity than switching to InDesign - especially if it happened to fix the transparency issues we have with FM7. Currently, for slides with transparency, we link to a hidden slide that has a screenshot of the transparent items. It's a workflow nightmare, not to mention the issues with printing screenshots. But it's been done this way for 10 years. If it's not broken, why fix it? Thank you SP3 for finally breaking it!!

Thanks again for the replies. Y'all pretty much confirmed what I was thinking.

[Seanb_us]

PowerPoint itself has transparency issues (black square). I don't expect FM9 to fix that, but if it does I'll post here--still using 8 looking for 9. PowerPoint seems to munge colors, graphics, and fonts ... and FrameMaker's unique approach to such things doesn't help.

How about PPT -> PDF -> bunch of EPS -> FM?

Cheers,

Sean