Plugin to ease addition of files in books

[FrameMaker-dk]

I make a lot of manuals. The procedure is like this. I get a pdf with a long list of file names.These are the names of framemaker files which are supposed to go into FrameMaker book files.

I manually add the framemaker files to book files, but it is tedious work and I would like a plugin which could import a csv file with all the file names and then build the book file.for me.

Would anybody know whether it is possible to have such a plugin/extension programmed? It needs to work with FM 9

best regards Bjørn

[Art_Campbell1]

Rick Quatro can probably do a FrameScript that will do that. He's at rick@frameexpert.com.

However, if you have one template file, you can SaveAs that file to create your empty container files in a few minutes. Then Add all of them in one pass to your book. Takes less than a few minutes....

Cheers,

Art

[Russ Ward]

Hi Bjørn,

It certainly is possible and sounds like a relatively simple plugin, although I don't know if you'll get anyone to write it for free. I would be willing to discuss it with you offline at russ@weststreetconsulting.com if you are interested.

Thanks,

Russ

[AxialInfo]

It's possible to do this with using macros or a scripting program, e.g. within Excel or some other macro languag, or even with a small database form.

The basic idea is to create a "minimalist" MIF file containing just the few lines needed for the book itself and the correct syntax around each chapter name.

Unfortunately the MIF reference manual doesn't seem to give a clear example for creating a minimalist book file, but it does have a good summary of the book-level MIF statements.

As with a chapter-level MIF file, FM has built-in defaults for a lot of the statements so assuming those default values are acceptable, you don't need to include many of them.

Many moons ago I had Excel spreadsheets with multiple columns containing the MIF statements and the one key column where the actual chapter name was contained and then more columns to the right of that containing the rest of the syntax.  This was back in Excel '97 or earlier which had the annoying habit of padding out text columns with spaces so after saving (or exporting) the sheet as a .txt then I changed the filename to .mif and also ran a search/replace utility to remove spaces as needed. So in this case there weren't even any macros involved in the Excel file.

As a start, I'd suggest creating a small 2-chapter book file with your current process, save the book file as MIF, and then examine it in a text editor.

One other caveat, with FM 9 it's better to use a text editor that can handle unicode characters. One suggestion is EmEditor, at

http://www.emurasoft.com