How can I get the F8 and F9 function keys in FM 10.0 to work like they did in FM 7.1?

[Guest]

We just purchased the Adobe Technical Communications Suite 10.0 and have FrameMaker 10.0 installed. What's frustrating is that F8 and F9 work "sometimes" to provide a shortcut to text formatting and paragraph formatting, but they don't work consistently. Is this a bug? I need a fix that would get them to work consistently. (Alt+OPC to format text with the default font is another key combination that works, but it doesn't work consistently.)

thanks in advance!

ChristyG

[Matt-Tech Comm Tools]

Not a direct answer to your question, but you can use the Control-8 and Control-9 keys to get the same functionality.

-Matt

[Guest]

Thanks for your reply, Matt, but neither Control+8 or Control+9 work for me either.

I've looked at the keyboard shortcuts in the online help. There are several that don't work for me, but there are a couple that do. When there is a shortcut that won't work for me, the words, "Not Applicable" appear in the status bar.

These Don't work for me:

Apply a paragraph format: Esc q p, F9, Control+9

Apply a character format: Esc q c, F8, Control+8

Apply default font to formatted characters: Esc o c p (opens the CMS Preferences dialog instead - weird!)

These Do work for me:

Repeat last action: F6

Start paragraph anywhere: Esc j Shift+a

Start paragraph at top of page: Esc j Shift+p

Apply default font to formatted characters:  Alt+ocp from FrameMaker 7.1 works for me

(There's others that work for me, but the one's I'd most likely use via keystrokes are listed above.)

regards,

Christy

[Guest]

Of course, as soon as I replied to Matt, F8, F9, Control+8, and Control+9 started working for me with noooooo problem.

I think when I was testing other keystrokes using the Esc key, it might have cleared something up. I'll cross my fingers and hope they remain working.

regards,

ChristyG

[Arnis Gubins]

Christy,

The "Not Applicable" in the status bar is the default entry (now). Just start typing the name of the paragraph or characer that you need (or click on the "Not Applicable", if you're mouse-centric to get a list).

Esc q c (for character formats) and Esc q p (for paragraph formats) can also be used.

These shortcuts all point back to the same command, but the new OWL interface sits in-between the keyboard and FM now processing the keystrokes first. It *is* quirky, so at times the shortcuts seem to stop working and then suddenly work again. It's quite frustrating for those used to smooth keyboard operations.

If you want to see all of the keyboard shortcuts that you have available, get Scott Prentice's excellent utility ListShortcuts at: http://www.leximation.com/tools/info/listshortcuts.php

I've used it with FM10 and there are 1106 shortcuts.

[Guest]

Thank you for your reply, Arnis! I had never heard of the OWL interface, but the quirks you described seem to be what I'm experiencing.

regards,

ChristyG

[Reed_D]

The F8 (character formatting) and F9 (paragraph formatting) shortcut keys operate intermittently in FrameMaker 9 also. I agree: it's frustrating. You'd think Adobe would have fixed this by now. I can get the shortcut keys to work again by restarting FrameMaker.

[Mike Wickham]

I think someone recently pointed out that the intermittence relates to

whether or not the text frame has focus (rather than a dialogue box).

Shift+F7 returns focus to the text frame, then the F8 and F9 keys should

work as expected.