Loss of AutoNum Override (Unstruct to Struct)

[CAIDave]

We are in the process of converting from unstructured to structured.

When a baseline unstructured document has an entire paragraph that is modified, we change all of the text in the paragraph red by applying a character tag. If the paragraph has an auto number this also changes the paragraph’s auto number character color. When we do a conversion to structure, the text in the paragraph remains red but the auto number goes back to the original color. We have tried with and without “flag paragraph format overrides” and “flag character format overrides” just to try something, but nothing changed. It is corrected after conversion by selecting the entire paragraph, going to the character designer (which shows the correct character tag), and hitting apply.

We have tried this on Windows (7/Vista) FrameMaker 9, 10 , and 11 with the same results. I am trying to figure out of this is expected behavior or a bug. Does anyone know if this is how it should work? 

Along the same lines..a superscripted character in the middle of the paragraph is no longer superscripted, is not red, and is not wrapped in a character tag element. The text on either side of it (same paragraph) is wrapped in the character tag element.

Thanks

[Van Kurtz]

In theory and in good practices, a structured document has NO formatting. A structured document is simply elements inside elements and text inside some elements. One should never (at least in my opinion) apply formatting to a structured document, neither at the paragraph level nor at the character level.

The proper way to format a structured document is through the application that processes it, in this case the application is FrameMaker. FrameMaker formats a structured document via  the document's EDD, which not only describes the allowed structure but applies the formatting to the structure using rules that the author of the EDD sets up.

So, if you want to mark content as being modified by coloring its content red, then one would use an attribute in each element to specify whether the content is modified or not. Thus, if the attribute is name modified, then an element with original content has its modified attribute set to NO and an element with changed content has its modified attribute set to YES. On can even specify that the default value is NO, so that the author does not have to set it whenever new content is created. Thus, when the author modifies the content, the author then changes the modified attribute from no to yes. The EDD then formats the color of the text according to whether the modified attribute is yes or no.

That being said, one can also track changes by using FrameMakers tracking feature; however, I do not and have never used it, so I will leave it to others to explain it.

In MY EDD, I superscript and subscript characters by wrapping the characters in an element whose attributes specify whether the characters are to be superscripted or subscripted. The EDD reads the attribute values and formats the characters accordingly. The point is a structured document has NO formatting. Any "applied" formatting is done by wrapping content in elements and assigning values to the attributes in those elements. On the other hand, the current version and most recent versions of FrameMaker are compatible with Unicode. So, if your Unicode font has already superscripted or subscripted characters, one can insert them without having to wrap them in elements. But such characters are generally limited to only numbers and a few letters.

Conversions from unstructured documents to structured ones are not always, moreover rarely, clean. One typically has to do a lot of clean up after the conversion to get the structure correct, that is, valid. The flag paragraph format overrides and flag character format overrides are features to help you in the conversion process. They are used to show you paragraphs and character strings whose formatting in the UNSTRUCTURED document is different from the formatting that is applied by your EDD. These features help you to clean these areas up by assigning the correct elements and attributes. They are NOT used in your everyday processing of structured documents. Again, the formatting is done by the EDD (in the template) NOT by the writer's applying unstructured formats.

I hope this helps,

Van

[CAIDave]

Van

Thanks for a great concept. We have been trying to sit back and look at the big picture of where we want to get to. This is definitely a clean approach to consider.

As we try to figure out how to get there, we need take advantage of conversion tools where possible (we have 5,000-10,000 pages to convert). We do anticipate a large manual clean up effort.

Thanks