FrameMaker hangs regularly

[léandro_0776]

Hi,

With FrameMaker 2022 (v17), when editing a 750 pages document converted from a previous release, I have 2 problems:

1) At start, it says "At least one original filter used for graphics is not available......"

How can I find what graphic is missing or bad?

2) Regularly, Frame hangs for 30s. It's very disruptive, how can I find why and remedy to it?

I use an Intel 24 core, a GEN4 NVME SSD and 128GB  memory, so resources are not the problem.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[Winfried Reng]

Hi,

1 Does the message say which filter is affected?

When an image cannot be imported, FrameMaker will show a grey box instead.

You can create a PDF and flip through it manually to detect the grey boxes.

Or you could open the Inset pod (View | Panels | Inset) and check the type. There are "Image" and "Unresolved Image" and probably more. You can sort or filter the items in this list to find problem graphics.

2 What do you do, when FrameMaker hangs? Do you flip through the pages? Then I would guess that graphics are involved. What happens, when you do not display graphics (View | Options)? Does this happen as well?

Do you have the latest update installed? Can you check your update in Help | About?

Best regards, Winfried

[léandro_0776]

1 - No, it just say there is one . I opened the Inset panel, it's very convenient, thanks for pointing it out.
The is no Unresolved. and going through each of them (it's really fast) displays an image every time.

The exact message is:

At least one original filter used for graphics imported by reference is not available, or the imported file's format has changed. An alternative filter may be used if the file is recognized as a graphic FrameMaker can import.

2 - Anything actually. For example for (View | Panels | Inset) just clicking on View did it.

I'll try without displaying graphics and get back to you. I don't have a specific way to trigger it, I'll just have to work a while and see if it happens or not.

Thanks.

[léandro_0776]

That did not take long: PageDown triggered it.

[léandro_0776]

Maybe not, it went away much faster I think.

[léandro_0776]

Nope, that was just wishfull thinking: it happens regularly, and hangs around 30s.

[Winfried Reng]

Which file formats do you use in your document?

If this does not give a hint, then you should split the document in two halfs and then open these and then check, if you get an error message.

And then probably some more halfs to get a page with such a graphics file.

[léandro_0776]

If you mean the graphics, they were created a long time ago in .rast format.

I think I am getting close: while editing a specific page, I had hang-ups almost at every action.

There were a lot of anchored frames, that on a old FrameMaker release showed a box around the text.
Here, the box was not displayed, even inside FrameMaker.

Removing these frames solved it, I could continue working on this page.

I still have occasional hang-ups, I'm going to search for other similar pages.

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

#2 - is this happening with just one doc or all your docs? Is this a new install of FM 2022 (what point version are you on?)?

[léandro_0776]

Just one doc, but I found the problem: some anchore frames created with an old FrameMaker version should show a box around the text inside, but do not. Removing these frames and reformatting solved it, but it's a lot of work, it hangs at every action.

[FrameMaker-dk]

"1) At start, it says "At least one original filter used for graphics is not available......"

How can I find what graphic is missing or bad?"

Try going to the folder where you store your graphics. Sort the folder by file type. If you have files of the type *.tif, *.tiff, *.bmp - they may be likely culprits, and you can try converting these file to *.png and relink them.

Regarding the document and the hanging problem... Is it ONE big fm file or is it a book with multiple chapters?

[léandro_0776]

I think it's because this doc was created a long time ago on Unix with .rast files. They do show, but trigger this warning.

I could convert them, but it's not worth the time just to supress this warning.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

I had to look up what a .rast file was! Did FrameMaker ever import that file format? 

[FrameMaker-dk]

Yep! I made some russian manuals in 1996 with imported rast files 🙂

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

Live and learn! I started with Frame around 1992-93, but never came across that file format! 

[léandro_0776]

That was a common format on Sun Stations.

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

That would certanly explain my ignorance. I started with the Mac version, went to both Mac and Windows from version 5-7, and changed to Windows-only (obvously) after that. Never used a Unix system.

[frameexpert]

What would be interesting is to save a copy of the document and delete everything except one of the .rast files. See if the graphics message persists. If it does, run my script to get the current import hint data.

Then, reimport the same graphic, and run the script and see if there are differences in the import hint data.

If there are differences, a possible solution would be a script that would walk through each graphic and simply reimport it. Presumeably, the latest import filter would be used and that would eliminate the problem.

[léandro_0776]

That's a lot of work to eliminate a warning, I'll just get used to it in that particuar dicument. 🙂

[Bob_Niland]

léandro: I think it's because this doc was created a long time ago on Unix with .rast files. They do show, but trigger this warning.

I could convert them, but it's not worth the time just to supress this warning.

And being Unix, there wasn't even any convention for filename extensions.

When I ran into this they were name.rf

They are probably worth converting to a format with a future, which for raster might be PNG.
In my case, the original files couldn't even be found, and the images had to be extracted from surviving PDFs.

[frameexpert]

Extracting the images directly from FrameMaker as PDFs is a workable solution. I have written several scripts over the years that does this. In addition to exporting each image as a PDF, a script can immediately replace the old image with the newly exported PDF. Alternatively, some users will batch convert the exported PDFs to another format and then a second script will import the new images in place of the originals.

[Bob_Niland]

An issue that needs a serious ponder in image recovery is chosing between:

• grabbing the image as-cropped in the PDF, or
• extracting the original image as imported,
  which may have extents not visible in the PDF

[frameexpert]

I solve this by isolating the anchored frame and exporting it and its contents to a PDF. This captures any sizing and cropping of the image that was done in FrameMaker and captures any FrameMaker objects that may have been added to the anchored frame (callouts, etc.). The result is a single, composite PDF image that matches what you see in FrameMaker.

[léandro_0776]

I am using Gimp to read my .rast files, and convert to .jpg.

[Bob_Niland]

léandro: I am using Gimp to read my .rast files, and convert to .jpg.

If they are all contone images (e.g. photos, color or B&W), that's fine. JPG uses curve-matching compression, which works for scan lines that describe curves through colorspace.
If any are line art, (2-tone) B&W, or have regions of flat (monotone) colors or shades, JPG is going to introduce "ringing" artifacts at edges. Something that uses repeat-count compression would be more suitable, such as PNG.