Non-Breaking Spaces in Structured FM9 Make a File Invalid

[biker_jr]

Hi All,

I'm working with Structured FrameMaker to author XML and I'm facing a problem that I've never had with FM 7.2: if I have a non-breaking space in a variable definition, when FM saves the file, it replaces the non-breaking space with the character code 0x11. I get the error message that states the file contains invalid characters. Worst of all, I can't reopen this file any longer with FM...

Is there any solution or workaround? For me it's a crucial issue as it just doesn't allow me to continue using FM for XML.

I'll appreciate any advice. Many thanks in advance,

Alex

[Michael_Müller-Hillebrand]

It seems to me this was fixed in one of the minor updates. Do you have 9.0p250 (aka as 9.0.3). If not, you definitely should update your version.

- Michael Müller-Hillebrand

[biker_jr]

Hi Michael,

Thank you for answering. I installed the patch you mentioned, but it doesn't seem to work. The problem I describe still persist.

Is there a way to make it work? It's very critical to us as this doesn't allow us to keep using FrameMaker...

Thanks in advance,

Alex

[Michael_Müller-Hillebrand]

Hi Alex,

I created a new document from a structured template I use. I added a user variable with the following definition:

Text\ With\ Nbsp

I added this variable to some text, I saved as XML and the resulting XML contains the text of the variable and all non-breaking spaces show up as U+A0 characters as they should.

Since we learned there are two ways to specify a non-breaking space in FrameMaker 8/9 I tried this: I put the Alt+0160 character into the variable, which behaves like the backslash+space but does not show up as a special character on screen. Save As XML, no problem, valid file, both types of non-breaking spaces are translated to U+A0.

Have you checked your Read/Write rules do not contain any rules that might change the non-breaking space to something else?

- Michael

[Guest]

Hi Alex,

was this document created with FM7.2?

If you have created this document with FM7.2 then you might get this errors. (I'm not sure why though ...)

What I do is open the xml document in the editor and replace all " " with an space.

The document then can be opened in FM9.

Depending on the settings that you have choosen, the variables and cross references should be refreshed on opening, so that the non-breaking space is inserted again.

Very important:

So not save any document, when you get the error with the Unicode 0x11.

Otherwise your document might be quite a bit smaller afterwards, as FrameMaker deletes all the texts that come after the "invalid char".