Tips for Efficient Formatting of Huge Documents?

[Jim Royal]

I've been tasked with converting several 500+ page documents into FrameMaker. The source material is a hodgepodge of Word, InDesign, and Quark Xpress.

I've created the templates without problem. But the conversion is going at about one-third of the speed I anticipated because of the extraordinary amount of character-level formatting this material requires.

I'm copying-and-pasting chapters into blank templates, stripping out all the original formatting. I then make two passes: a quick one for paragraph-level styles and an excruciating one for character-level styles. Nearly every sentence has a word or three that require a character tag. I know the keyboard shortcuts for applying character tags, but it's a still real slog.

Is there any way to automate some of this? Can I search-and-replace for commonly-used terms that have special formatting, and replicate the formatting for those terms across the document? Back when I was using FM for Mac, I could use AppleScript for some of this.  Is there something else I can do to be more efficient?

[Arnis Gubins · Accepted solution]

Jim,

You can load formats (character and paragraph) onto FM's clipboard using the Copy Special command. Then using the Find/Change, you can specify the Change part to use "By Pasting". This will apply the format from the Clipboard to what you have in the Find section.

[Art Campbell]

And if the book file is open, you can do it across all component chapters.

You may be able to do some fancier searching if you use the wildcard capabilities too -- it supports some Boolian expressions. And of course there are FrameScripts that would automate it.

We may be able to come up with some better suggestions if you could give us some examples. Off the top of my head, I could think of searching for text strings that are parts of directory paths and applying a Code tag...

[Jim Royal]

This helps quite a bit. Thanks. I will investigate the use of wildcards in particular.

For example, if I have a series of words that require code formatting such as:

OS_OPT_POST_FLAG_SET

OS_OPT_POST_FLAG_CLR

OS_ERR_NONE

OS_ERR_OBJ_PTR_NULL

OS_ERR_OBJ_TYPE

I know that using regular expressions, I could easily find these words using the underscore as a unique identifier. I will see if I can do the same in FM.