Side Header Vertical Text Option?

[Misha_Ko]

I have to try and create a side header with the Chapter Title -- or section Heading One -- running up the page, bottom to top.

Because that's what the WORD format I'm trying to match offers, and our Head Poo-Bah has already expressed his

admiration for that particular repeating text style.

After drawing a thin little text box at the bottom right side of the page, I created an appropriately small single-celled

table inside it (with no lines defining the cell) and found the "change text direction" (table cell) tool under the graphics

pull-down menu.

If I paste a header in the table cell, is it really going to work, or will FM just keep crashing, or generating bad PDF's,

or who knows what....

Are there any examples of FM-generated docs out there that have text typed in them in a vertical orientation?

....I ask because I, too, am running FM 9 on a Windows 7 64-bit Dell "Graphics Special," with the latest video driver

installed.

I haven't been using FM9 for very long, partly because I got it not long ago, and partly because it keeps crashing.

The Paragraph Designer dialogue box just becomes useless, or disappears altogether. I can't just exit the file and

re-open, I have to close FM and re-open it, or restart the box. It's almost a stealth crash, because everything else

appears to keep working normally.

The latest driver for the video card has been located and installed, with no improvement in the frequency of crashes.

I tend to work with a lot of other applications running at the same time -- Outlook, Firefox, Photoshop, Acrobat,

Word, Inkscape -- so maybe that's got something to do with it.

Any suggestions or ideas anyone has would be appreciated.

[Misha_Ko]

FWIW, I got only so far with the vertical one-cell table text.It started to look like it was

going to be way more trouble than it was worth -- I got that sinking feeling when I couldn't

select and scale down the size of the table cell, to keep it from leaking over the page

border -- so I typed and rotated some dumb text in a cool blue, italic font, and pasted

that on all 3 pages of the Master Page template.

Not really a workaround, but it might do for now.

Mike

[Guest]

Mike, about the crashing first. Please always include the exact FM version you're using, as shown in Help > About. If you don't have ver 9.0.4 (aka 9.0p255) then you definitely should do the update(s); FM updates must be installed individually, sequentially, they are not "roll-ups".

Updates - Adobe - FrameMaker : For Windows

There have been updates in the UI that solved [some/many] of the issues with lockups. The Paragraph Designer freeze is known problem; there are other threads on the forum that have some explanation and workarounds. Searching with the "Search FrameMaker Forums" search box for the terms "paragraph designer  freeze" will bring up a couple of the threads.

Edit: also, it's best to post multiple questions /unrelated issues in separate threads, to minimize confusion for responders.

Message was edited by: Sheila Carlisle

[Misha_Ko]

Oops, I'm running with FM 9.0p237.... so that must be under the p255 bar, if the numbering is consecutive.

Thanks for reading through the two unrelated questions.

1.) I'll update this afternoon.

2.) As far as the side heads go, I like that rotated text box idea. WORD formatting *is* created through a table, as I found out earlier today when I went in to strip out all the unnecessary clutter before importing content to my new FM file.

Much obliged.

[Guest]

Ah, importing from Word. Beware, there be dragons ...

Well, the best advice I can give you is that, especially as you're a new FM user, you'd be far better off not importing your Word file directly, but rather just make a brand new FM file, get the formatting set up the way you need in FM, and then bring your Word content over as text rather than as formatted Word content.

The problem with importing from other apps is that very often the features in the other app don't have a 1-to-1 correspondence in FM, and when that happens there can often be unexpected gotchas, sometimes very obvious (e.g. table headings) but other times the import results can have very subtle formatting differences that play havoc with your documents.

As a new user that puts you under multiple disadvantages because it's very possible to spend a whole lot of time beating against brick walls trying to figure out why something is working "this" way when the documentation says it should work "that" way ... and the reason can be difficult to pin down. Many times the differences depend on how the Word file(s) were created in the first place, on their consistency in the use of Styles vs. the more common "all Normal with overrides" approach.

Also, when you import a Word doc you get a huge amount of dreck, unused style names, even stuff that is impossible to find in regular FM but instead needs to be excised (hah! more like exorcised) using FM's text format called MIF (Maker Interchange Format), definitely not something for the new user to tackle especially if you're under pressure to get things properly converted.

There are several folks on the forum who do FM training and I'm sure they'd be glad to chime in with their experience on this issue, too <looking around at the assembled but mostly vacant seats .. maybe after the holidays>.

Sheila

[Misha_Ko]

Thanks for the advice. I'm not really a new FM user -- I started with FM 5.0, when just about the only image format you could import into an anchored frame was BMP -- but I am new to all the big dockable pods and multiple workspaces in FM9. (Or as of late yesterday afternoon, 9.0p255.)

But up to now, I've always worked with templates that someone else had set up.

The default "book" template I started with was set up for 7 by 9 pages, and bad old, curly, quaint, Times New Roman type. I'm still wrestling with page margins a little bit -- my first attempt took up a little too much of the page -- but tightening up the work space isn't a difficult adjustment to make.

The thing that might be harder is tinkering with the Master Page format itself. I'd like to have two versions of the same basic template, with the formatting tweaked for front-and-back printing and for single-sided-only output. But when I went to hit "delete" on the left hand master page in my template -- the left-hand layout -- the last lline in the pull-down was barking at me, "can't delete master page." But the Format > Page Layout > Pagination option did present a "single-sided" page count radio button, which I selected. Is that all I have to do to get what I want?

That's been my biggest complaint, so far. None of the online resourced I tried had FM templates for 64-bit Windows 7, and what came with the software was a little bit on the lame side. When you consider FM markets itself as the "long document" King of software, there was only the one book template, and it was set up for a paperback in a size format no one in the real world uses for printing.

Anyway, thanks a lot for your help and advice. I grabbed all the text at once in my WORD file and saved it all to a single "just the text, Ma'am" format, threw it into Notepad, saved as txt, and brought that into FM. It's looking OK so far.

All the best for the holidays,

Mike

[Misha_Ko]

Just one quick PS...

All the moaning and groaning aside, I'm looking forward to using Frame again.

I was crashing WORD 2 or 3 times a day, just pasting in graphics. And WINDOWS 7

is only about 7 times worse than XP. All the useful organization that was built in to

pull-down menus has been deleted. Move your mouse wrong and every open window

you've got ghosts out, fading in to empty frames with the wallpaper staring back at

you with nothing to say.

If I had to make an analogy, I'd suggestthat in general, using Microsoft applications

makes you feel like you're workingwith rubber, or taffy, or some other not quite

solild or substantial building material. To celebrate re-entry into Adobe land, I'm

going to find my Commodore's CD and cue up, "Brick House" while I finish up

my page margin adjustments.

Thanks again for your help.

[Guest]

About the side header design, there can be multiple ways to do this. The most important consideration is how your document(s) are created and organized, so that maintaining/changing the content of the vertical header can be most easily done.

Will you be using a book file with multiple chapters? Or will your documents be single, stand-alone FM documents, not part of a multi-chapter book?

The two most common choices for this doing this kind of heading are to insert either a variable or a cross-reference onto the master page(s), usually as a paragraph inside a text frame (not a table), and then rotate the text frame. Note that content inside a rotated text frame can't be edited, so you have to "un-rotate" the frame in order to change it, then re-rotate.

Variables and cross-references each have some distinct advantages; variables can contain any kind of text, while cross-references usually are set to refer to existing paragraphs (e.g. Heading1 or Chapter Title) in the chapter(s). The best choice depends on how the content needs to change, e.g. if it has to change multiple times within a single file because there are multiple Heading1 paragraphs then an x-ref is usually the best approach.