Is the .book extension interchangeable with the .bk extension?

Report · Jun 03, 2008

I am using FrameMaker 7.0 at work and all of our documents are created using structured Frame. Recently, when I was teaching a new employee how to use FM, I changed my version to unstructured by clicking File, then Preferences, then General from the menu bar. Then, on the Preferences dialog box, I clicked the arrow next to the Product Interface box to switch between FrameMaker and then clicked the Set button and restarted FM. Everything was fine. After our lesson, I switched back to Structured FrameMaker and restarted FM. But now book' is added to all of the files I open/save/close on my computer. My supervisor is concerned that I no longer have .bk' on there. It seems book' is there and bk' is no longer there. We make a lot of changes and conversions to our documents, and we're wondering if this is going to cause problems with changes that are made in book' and then changes that are made to bk'. My supervisor wants me to get book' off of the dropdown list and get back bk', like it was before I changed it to unstructured. Can anyone help? Thank you.

Maggie

Report · Jun 03, 2008

Maggie,

No need to post the same issue under different titles.

This is a system level configuration change and the ".book" is the
default setting for FM book files. The ".bk" extension is an old
deprecated format from well before FM 6.0. Your supervisor may be
making trouble for all of you by insisting on using the ".bk"
extension instead.

Anyway, you can add the ".bk" format using your file manager and
right-clicking on any of your book (.bk) files.

Select "Open With" from the context menu.

Scroll down the list of available applications to find "FrameMaker
7.0" and highlight it.

Then click in check-box for "Always use the selected program to open
this kind of file".

Click on the "OK" button to set this.

Report · Jun 03, 2008

Thank you, Arnis. I apologize for posting twice. I was afraid it was getting lost. Thanks again.

Maggie

Report · Jun 05, 2008

.bk is the old way of doing it, as Windows versions prior to Windows 95 could only handle 8.3 file names.

When Windows 95 came along and could handle filenames longer than 8.3 characters, FrameMaker (version 4 or 5?) started using the .book suffix instead of .bk

When PDF generation from FM came along, one of the critical things I had to do was change the FM file extensions in my legacy books from .bk to .book or else the links between files or books didn't work in the PDF. This was nothing to do with system file associations and everything to do with the PDF generation routines in FM not recognising a .bk file as a FrameMaker book.

Don't use .bk, or you're just asking for trouble.