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convextech67
convextech67
Known Participant
July 18, 2012
Question

How to get the Figure Title to appear below the graphic, not above

  • July 18, 2012
  • 1 reply
  • 5061 views

I have valid XML that I am importing into FrameMaker just for printing.

My <figure> element contains a <title> and a <graphic> element. The graphic comes in within an anchored frame, appearing after the figure title. The figure title needs to be below the graphic. How do I get this to work? I read a couple of threads that used tables to wrap the graphic & the title and to make the title appear below, but that was during an export function to XML, not an import. Short of editing the DTD, EDD & all of the XML data to have the graphic element structure come before the title within <figure>, how would this be accomplished? Thanks in advance.

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1 reply

ScottPrentice
ScottPrentice
Inspiring
July 18, 2012

Are you using a data model like DITA or one that you've created?

If it's your own model, just go into the DTD/EDD and move it .. but if it's one that's defined by another group, you don't want to do that since you'll be breaking the "standard". I'm assuming you're not using DITA since that has a <fig> and <image> elements not <figure> and <graphic>. In DITA-FMx (the plugin that I develop), I have an option to move the figure title below the image at "build" time. This is the proper time to move the element. Don't do it through some odd hack in the source .. that's called "tag abuse" and will come back to bite you eventually. The best option is to author it in the structre that's defined by the model, then create a publishing process that creates a book and component FM files from teh XML. This publishing process can then adjust the elements as needed through scripting (ExtendScript if you're using FM10). You may need to create a slightly different EDD for use in the "generated" files that differs from that of the XML source model.

If you are using DITA, and just got the element names wrong, you might consider using DITA-FMx .. it'll just make your life easier in the long run ..

     http://leximation.com/dita-fmx/

Cheers,

...scott

Scott Prentice

Leximation, Inc.

www.leximation.com

convextech67
convextech67Author
Known Participant
July 19, 2012

I am using a DoD DTD, but have had to modify the DTD greatly because the manufacturer did the last manuals before we got them, and they used their own version of DTDs. I have been given full rights to do whatever I have to do to the DTD to make this work (getting the manuals to print), except that this works just fine if I were to print out of Arbortext or using the government-issued system. The thing is, I can't use either system because my program can't afford them - they wanted to use something they already owned, which led me to FrameMaker. I guess I could make this version of the DTD a FrameMaker variant, since I had to make these DTDs variants from the rest of the DoD DTDs anyway...I am just not programmed to be a variant, I guess. I've always operated on the consistency engine. Thanks for your reply!

convextech67
convextech67Author
Known Participant
July 20, 2012

Well .. don't put the xrefs in the title, but create your xrefs so the reference the titles rather than the figures. You'll need to add IDs to the titles, then re-reference the xrefs so they point at the title elements. This should make it so it doesn't matter where the titles are.

...scott


Here's where I'm muddy on this. In the EDD under xref (CrossReference) I

have choices of figure, table, etc. If context type=figure, use

cross-reference format figure. Doesn't this point to the xref format in FM?

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