Index Markers in FM8

Report · May 17, 2011

I'm currently running Adobe FrameMaker 8, and I have a TON of tables. In the second column of every table (which can be anywhere from one row to 60+) I need to make each cell a Index Marker. As of yet I've had the Marker window open, tabbing through and when I get to the second cell I hit New Marker; it's fast for me to do and not many mistakes are made. Now I've got a 467 page document with at least 130 tables with who knows how many items need a Index Marker made.

My question is, is there another easier way to do this? I'm sort of resigned to tabbing through and markering every cell in the second column. I've tryed highlighting the whole column and hitting New Marker but that markers everything as one. I've found the keyboard shortcut for new marker but that takes me longer to hit than just a click.
Any advice would be appreciated.

Report · May 17, 2011

JB,

Well it looks like a job or dummies, but I am pretty sure it isn’t, because there are some cells for sure, where their content should not end up in a marker, or not all of it, or whatever... It is a tedious manual task, because it was not solved when the content was created originally.

I do quite a bit of FrameScript programming and I would have invested the maybe two hours for a script which I would have to throw away after the job is done. The two hours are just a guess, and have myself in mind, not a quality ready to be sent to someone who pays me...

Other ideas around the MIF version of the document:

• Just copy an Index marker with some dummy content to the clipboard and by tabbing through the table insert this marker. Then save as MIF and use a text editor with regular expression features to fill the paragraph content into the marker.

• With even more thought you could maybe do the whole job using a text editor (but it maybe hard – not impossible – to identify the second cell in each row).

Well, if you have FrameScript, there is a free script available that would allow you to just Arrow Down into the next cell, instead of Tab - Tab - Tab...

What do you think?

- Michael

Report · May 17, 2011

... and when I get to the second cell I hit New Marker; it's fast for me to do and not many mistakes are made. ... I've tryed highlighting the whole column and hitting New Marker ...

If you decide to try some MIF hacking or scripting, your "whole column" attempt suggests that there's something you need to know about what the Marker dialog is doing.

When you create an Index marker, you aren't just inserting the same Marker in each cell (although it seems like it). You are inserting a marker, of type Index, with custom Marker Text (which is what appears in the IX.fm file). The Marker Text does not need to match the source document text, although it often does. When you highlight some document text, that text is pre-loaded into the Marker Text: dialog.

I have a similar problem with tables of call-out numbers, part numbers and part descriptions that need Cross-Ref markers that are identical in each column except for the cell content appended to the marker text. I've been working on and off on writing a Python program to take a plain text part list and convert it to a .fm document with table and markers. This requires learning a little MIF (although the thing slowing me down is also having to learn Python after decades away from programming).

Report · May 18, 2011

I am guessing that your Frame files are unstructured. IF however they are structured, another approach is to somehow get your parts list into XML. You may be able to do this from the parts database. But once in XML, you can write an XSL transform that transforms the XML into a structure that is valid for your template. When you open the XML file in FrameMaker, FrameMaker can be made to apply the XSL automatically. We do this for our parts catalogs, mostly figures and tables. Our catalogs do not have indexes, but it would be easy to edit the XSL to put in the markers.

Van

Report · May 17, 2011

TechCommJB316 wrote:
I'm currently running Adobe FrameMaker 8, and I have a TON of tables. In the second column of every table (which can be anywhere from one row to 60+) I need to make each cell a Index Marker. As of yet I've had the Marker window open, tabbing through and when I get to the second cell I hit New Marker; it's fast for me to do and not many mistakes are made. Now I've got a 467 page document with at least 130 tables with who knows how many items need a Index Marker made.
My question is, is there another easier way to do this? I'm sort of resigned to tabbing through and markering every cell in the second column. I've tryed highlighting the whole column and hitting New Marker but that markers everything as one. I've found the keyboard shortcut for new marker but that takes me longer to hit than just a click.
Any advice would be appreciated.

Take a look at these:

Index tools regular and pro - inexpensive

http://siliconprairiesoftware.com/Products.html

Clickk downloads, then Markerworker

http://www.cudspan.net/plugins/executioner.php?do=displayPage&field_tab_num=1

HTH

Regards,

Peter

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Peter Gold

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