If there weren't quite so many of them, I'd suggest converting them all to EPS, which is probably the most stable FM import format. Should you decide to do it, also go back to the original PSDs (if saved) and re-save as EPS. We routinely keep the PSD masters at source resolution, with the final crop guides visible. We flatten, crop, re-size to 200 dpi, and save as EPS. It's then easy to [re]generate a modified image starting from maximum quality. JPEG is generally worth avoiding, both as an archival format, and as a Frame import format. If JPEG is all your camera emits, save a copy as something else right after camera download (PSD, DNG, TIFF or any other format that uses repeat-count, or no, compression), and use that as the edit and archival master. In addition to the version issues explored in this thread, JPEG always* has some level of lossy (curve-matching) compression in use. You get losses after editing the camera image even if saved at the full res. You get losses scaling (or just cropping and re-saving) it for import into frame. You can get more losses if print-to-PDF, Distiller or Acrobat Pro Optimize resamples it again. If your path is to critical color hardcopy, EPS also supports real CMYK that survives the GDI on all versions of Windows, including post-Vista editions with psuedo-CMYK support (that actually converts it to RGB and back). Plus, I really hate JPEG ringing-edge artifacts, but that's just me. ______ * Some of the newer exotic JPEG variants may have less destructive/annoying compression, but they have the too-new versioning issue. ... View more

If the real answer doesn't turn up, a MIF hack appears to be... The ChFmt "Unneeded" appears to be applied by the markup:   <Font      <FTag `Unneeded'>      <FLocked No> Default ¶ Font resumes with:   <Font      <FTag `'>      <FLocked No> Merely converting all instances of <FTag `Unneeded'> to <FTag `'> seems to be the equivalent of applying Default ¶ Font. I haven't tested to see if another open/save cycle or MIF wash eliminates the now-redundant do-nothing tags. ... View more

... and put a table of all my variables onto a reference page, but it doesn't work. What doesn't work: opening the Variables dialog without having a Body or Ref Page variable selected, or double-clicking on the Ref Page variable instance? I've learned in additional testing, that the variable actually has to be selected within the text in order to be editable. This sounds like a bug, installation, configuration or update fault on your specific machine. I don't have FM10, so I can't provide either confirmation or counter-behavior. We need some other FM10 users to test and report. ... View more

I am under the impression that FrameMaker simply pushes the eps file  through to the printer when creating the PDF or printing. That could easily be the case, except for ... If FrameMaker needs to send a  non-embedded font to the printer, then it simply has to find the font and send it. That's somewhat inconsistent with just pass it through. If it is not on the system, I doubt FrameMaker does  anything to the eps file before it sends it; any garbling in the output  is likely due to the printer/Distiller not having access to the font  required by the eps. This could easily be true. In my test, Frame (7.1 Unix) didn't complain when opening the .fm that contained an .eps that included Arial Unicode Chinese characters. It displayed the thumbnail, with the glyphs apparently present. It generated a .ps file without complaint. Curiously, I distilled that .ps to .pdf on the same PC that created the EPS. That PC has that font. The glyphs were garbled in the PDF. Hmmm. This scenario is our workflow, by the way, and not just a test scenario. We author on FM7.1/Unix, but edit and create graphical objects on Win64 PCs (which product objects are usually EPS, often with text, possibly Unicode). We Distill on the PCs. Today's test confirmed why I have a rule of: either embed the fonts, or convert text to outlines. If you convert text to outlines, of course, the EPS is no longer "text" when re-opened in AI. Others  have explained on this forum that Illustrator can (if you tell it to)  save the AI-dependent information in the eps file. So, the eps file has  the same information as is in the AI file. As a recent member, I haven't seen that. Thanks. I suspect the same is true for PDFs saved from AI, but there's still the convert-to-outlines issue. Possibly one could copy all the text to a new layer. Outline in the new layer. Hide the real text layers. Save as EPS. Now you'd have a portable print object with full original edit capability (and a few tens of kB more metadata that needs to be redacted from the final PDF for the sake of size). ______ It's easier to simply retain the .ai master. We do the same for PSD, where the product is also an EPS, and has to be flattened for save as EPS. ... View more

What version of Frame? If FM10, new options may be available. ... View more

It seems that if the variable is defined, but is not actually used in the text of the document, the variable cannot be edited. However, if I insert the variable into the text of the document, I can then edit it. Assuming this is intended FM10 behavior on the part of Adobe, and not a bug, here's a tip. Rather than temporarily insert a Variable in the Body text, you might ... Create a new Reference Page named "Variables", that contains a text frame (perhaps two- or three-column). Insert an instance of every User Variable in that text frame*. This way, they are always "used", and they are easy to edit (from that page). No need to scroll through the Var dialog. Just double-click on each var instance on the Ref Page. _______ * Use a table on the Ref Page, and you can sort the Vars by definition. ... View more

The Master Page mostly contain headers and footers describing the  document, page and chapter numbers.  A cosmetic bar down one side.   There is a text frame on the page, but it is empty (occasionally used  for "Draft" or whatever). So the MPs contain no default text frame(s) for Flow A body text? That implies that body text resides in hand-crafted floating text frames on each body page, which frames may or may not be connected to one another from column to column or page to page. True? ______ This sounds very much like the legacy documents I inherited in my current position. They were using "ransom note" page composition, with text and graphics frames scattered all over the place. Often the text frames were not connected. There were frequent frame overlaps, plus text flow-unders (out of sight at the bottom of unconnected frames). I migrated these documents to MPs with suitable default text frames, and have had no frame overlaps since. ... View more

I have a doc that, for some reason, has a new text frame layered on top of the first one. There are several ways that can happen. I can delete the new frame to get at the real text, but it has happened on all pages of the doc. What's on the Master Page(s)? ... View more

Arnis: If you size your graphics in AI to a standard canvas size and save as  PDF or EPS, the they should always import at a constant size in FM - the  bounding boxes will then always be the same. Illustrator has an artboard size, not a canvas size. And Frame brings the EPS in at the size of the object extents (the EPS bounding box), and ignores artboard size. The anchoring frame size is slightly larger than the EPS bounding box. I've never tried to figure out how much. Van: Because you are using Illustrator, you do not need to save the file both  as AI and as eps. Take the advice given by others and use eps. You can  edit an eps file in Illustrator. I keep an AI master regardless. Since the basenote indicated Frame 7, there is a small chance that saving EPS out of Illustrator versions later than 9 could create an EPS that FM7 can't handle (e.g. embedded Unicode fonts*), and if down-saved to EPS/9, you might lose some ability to edit the content later in AI. The .ai is the master. The .eps is the product. I also routinely save a PDF of each image, for convenience browsing in the image directory by people who don't have AI. __________ * I just tested importing an EPS saved as IA version CS5. Unless the Unicode font is embedded in the EPS, Frame 7 will display the thumbnail correctly, but silently generate garble in the resulting PDF. If the font is embedded, it seems to work. ... View more

... jpeg same as all the other 200 graphics JPEG (5 or lower) or JPEG2000? We had a problem with FM7 and JPEG2000 images (which turned out also to be indexed color B&W (R=G=B))* I don't have FM10 (do have 9), but primarily use 7.1. I can imagine FM7.x having problems generating seps from version of JPEG it doesn't support. But this is all supposition. _______ * We figure that our predecessors were trying (in the Jedi sense) to make more compact images by converting RGB color to B&W by desaturating in Photoshop, rather than actually converting to grayscale, and then adding insult to injury by saving as indexed color, and for extra credit, failing to pay attention to JPG version. The printed results of these bogo JPGs was a blocky 10 (ten) dpi out of the PDF, but at least you could see that an image was there. ... View more

I added some graphics in FM10 ... What graphics file format? Imported by reference, or copied into document? If color, RGB or CMYK model? ... View more

If you ever need a workflow that crosses the Unicode barrier (between  FrameMaker versions 7.2 and 8) you have to test everything, since the  additional power of Unicode encoding may introduce stuff, that will get  lost in previous versions. Thanks for confirming my suspicion. We will eventually have to migrate from Solaris/SPARC FM7.1 to Windows/X64 FM9 or later, and I'm thinking that once a document is modified on FM9, it's a one-way trip. Back-porting MIFs without [possibly silent] errors is not assured. IMO, the even simpler and almost always good enough method was to just switch off the »Save Unknown Font Names« in File > Preferences before opening and saving such files. Thanks for the reminder. I didn't think of that because I can't fully use the feature because... This replaces those font  references with the default font (which in turn can be set in the  maker.ini, if you really need something special). This is Unix, so there is no .ini (and I've hacked maker.ini a few times on Windows). There is some Unix equivalent feature, and for some reason it cannot be modified on the workstation I use. Our Sun-guru IT guy has been unable to figure out why (it doesn't seem to be a simple problem of file permissions). So I'm still using, and cannot change, the start-up defaults of my predecessor here, including font mapping. ... View more

You could have separate book files, each with its own special files  (TOC, IX). As yes, of course, and that would have another advantage in having the desired [different] default .ps printfile name. Typically, such files don't have content other than the  generated content. Actually, all but the BODY file would be generated and rarely need touching. I don't think I'm going to need to do this, but I;m going to use some of these tips on another aspect of the current challenge. Thanks for all the help. ... View more

What’s the quickest way to get them all to a uniform size to each other in AI and in FrameMaker? Save them as EPS from AI. Be sure to include thumbnails/previews. Frame honors the dimensional size of EPS imports, and doesn't even know the dpi if the object is just a single bitmap. Text remains text (and you can embed fonts). Vectors remain vectors. The preview is coarse (72 dpi). There's a hack to go higher, but that defeats your goal of "import at my declared size please". The above may also work with PDF export/import, but it's unstable in FM7.1, so I use EPS. ... View more

The way our company gets around this is to use a special paper size with  the smaller width of A4 ... I basically already have that. Our column, header and footer widths were selected so that our PDFs could be printed on USL or A4 without rescaling (as long as the user turns off scaling in Reader - most people have it on by default). ... and the smaller height of US letter. If we decide to recast for A4, one reason for doing so would be aesthestic - fully using the A4 page space as we do the USL space. If the extra top/bot whitespace is not a problem, we can just print to A4 from today's PDFs. ... haven't found a service bureau yet that wants FM files ... Apparently they used to exist. My guess is that FM revision churn, plus a large heap of font issues (largely solved by .ps or .pdf with embedded fonts) made it easy to decide to cease accepting jobs in native DTP formats. ... View more

I would avoid the text inset (second workflow you mention) workflow, because you will have problems with cross-references. Roger that. I can see that I would indeed have Xref problems. Sad, because it would have allowed a common set of authoring master files, and two sets of print-only files that were just insets (and already had the necessary condition codes preset for switching content between domestic and export variants of the product). In the first workflow, you can save some steps by naming the master pages in each version (letter, A4) the SAME. Wilco. ... no need to reapply master pages, because the imported ones write over the existing ones with the same names. Perhaps not so, as the content is going to reflow due both to page size and condition codes being changed for each edition. Some content is apt to end up with an incorrect MP. And by the way, selecting AMP in Update Book is broken in Unix FM7.1. Content often ends up with an incorrect MP. Have to do AMP separately. No need to open each one separately. Well, I do, because some book component files (TOC, IX) have different layouts for the same MP name. I might be able to fix that with some Master Page Mapping Table creativity, but I had no luck with that years ago when developing the layouts (I knew less then, but may not know enough more now). Meanwhile, this is a surprising state of affairs for a DTP app that once promoted itself as "write once - publish everywhere". Frame has more powerful conditional capabilities than some apps, but is apparently weaker than others. ... View more

The usual suspects (in my experience): document is not in duplex mode the para with the ToRP attribute has keep with next/previous issues the preceding para has keep with next issues the succeeding para has keep with previous issues ... View more

Acrobat Pro (9 for sure, perhaps earlier) has a specific feature for white-on-white text. It turns out that I was mistaken about that.  Acrobat X Help (but 9 works the same way) says (about the Examine Document feature): Hidden Text This item indicates text in the PDF that is either transparent, covered up by other content, or the same color as the background. It isn't restricted to just white. I tested a black-on-black, and Acrobat Pro does indeed remove the black text and leave the black box[es?]. So if AcroX were to implement KonK redact, it would have to replace the  entire series of font rectangles with one long rectangle. I did my FM7 test using the traditional anchored frame per word, at insertion point, with a text frame inside it. So my black box was one long rectangle. In the FM10 highlight feature, what ends up in the .ps or .pdf? I'm guessing it's a box-per-character, whose height is the vertical extents of the font and whose width is the horizontal extents of the current glyph. ... View more

If you put black text on a black background, then (depending upon  security settings in the PDF) you can still copy & paste the  "invisible" text. Security features won't help. PDF is simply not secure against  determined attackers. The only way to redact a PDF is for the text to  flat not be there. So AcroX has no new capabilities for K-on-K. The redaction route that gets one in trouble. As any number of hapless lawyers have discovered the hard way (that and Word metadata). Acrobat Pro (9 for sure, perhaps earlier) has a specific feature for white-on-white* text. It can remove the text entirely. The problem is that it leaves white space, making the reader wonder: did they redact, or just run out of pixels?. It might be preferrable to leave deliberate black boxes so that the redaction is prominent. However, leaving a series of black boxes, each representing the font extents of the redacted characters, is unwise. For starters, the reader knows exactly how many characters were redacted, and unless the font was changed for that text, they have a significant insight into the metrics. Reverse-engineering the exact text redacted might often require only a modest effort. So if AcroX were to implement KonK redact, it would have to replace the entire series of font rectangles with one long rectangle. Sounds like Acro hasn't even gotten to square one on that enhancement. ______ * W-on-W redaction cautions: If the text and bg whites are different by even one bit, the text remains (RGB white on CMYK white is OK, however). If any part of a white character is over a bg element that is not 100.00% white, the entire character remains. ... View more

How do I put a cross-reference in a variable? Double hop hack: make something in the current document that a spare Running_H/F_# Variable can be defined to point at. The {something} would then be an Xref to the other document. You might have to make the {something} invisible text on a Body or Master page. I don't know if it could reside on a Reference Page. ... View more

Trade off: smooth edges vs ugly typography And the last line won't necessarily right-justify at all. But at least now we know the trade-offs for this new feature. Can Acrobat X do anything interesting in PDF post-processing with black-on-black? (like, say, delete the text, but leave the background - and yes, that wouldn't be a fully irreversible redaction) ... View more

... if you set the line spacing too loose or make too large of gap between  paragraphs, then the shading will look more like highlighting. Does setting the pfg fmt justification to both left and right help with the lateral problem? (I don't have FM10 and can't test it.) It seems like a single-cell borderless table is still the way to go, as long as you don't mind handling end-of-page/column flow by breaking the shaded text across borderless rows. ... View more

That might be a good item to submit as a feature request. More of a bug report - I'd expect "suppress hyphenation across pages" to be On by default, and I'm surprised to hear that it isn't. I suspect no one would complain if suppression were the case and there was no dialog to turn it off. Perhaps where the notional control belongs is Format > Document > Text Options Suppress Hyphenation Across: [_] Columns     Pages ... View more

I don't know if FM9 has any additional controls, but Frame has had, for a long time, the ability to suppress hyphenation by paragraph type. In 7.0 for example: Format > Paragraphs > Designer > Advanced [_] Hyphenate [Update All] I recently used this for a manual intended for an audience whose first language was not English, but generally you won't want to turn it off throughout. An alternative is to have it on for Body, and use local overrides, or set up Body.nh which has it off by default, and apply it as needed. ... View more

There is, this is a new feature in FrameMaker 9. Cool. We'll give that a try when next needing to revise or source from legacy documents. Even though our production environment is FM7.1/Unix, presumably opening in FM9/Win, cleaning up fonts, and re-saving as MIF would allow subsequent opening in FM7.1 (or would it ... I can conceive of [Unicode] font encoding issues arising). Of course, for those without FM9 or 10, the classical way to handle Missing Fonts was to save as MIF, and use a text editor to perform global search&replace on the phantoms. There are just too many places for fonts to hide to chase them down from within pre-9 Frame. ______ And if the missing font name is not found in the MIF, it's being invoked in an imported object. ... View more

I was able to PDF ok from FM9 using Acrobat 6, ... What font name, format (TTF, PFB/PFM, OTF?) and vintage? Did you upgrade the fonts when upgrading the apps? Any chance you have multiple copies of the same typeface name installed? Historically, having both the TTF and PFM (Type 1) of the same name installed could have undesired results. ... but when I upgraded to Acrobat 9.2, I'm getting some missing text in the PDF. Some non-bold text is missing. What is "some text"? Some entire typefaces (all text thereof), or just some characters of a typeface, like, say, the ligatures in Helvetica. The number for Chapter 3 is missing in the TOC. What font is Frame looking for? _______ Also, are you embedding the fonts during PDF creation? ... View more

Consider the possibility that this might not be an Adobe bug. Rule out that anyone has messed with the XP window focus behavior by using TweakUI or similar tool. Rule out that there is any malware installed, some of which reportedly affects focus (deliberately or not). Rule out that any keylogging app is installed (such as corporate snoopware), which is catching all keystrokes, doing whatever it does with them, and then passing them on, ineptly, to the requesting process. ... View more

FM7 is not supported any more We're primarily using FM7.1 Unix. 7004, 6055410, 7658003, 0 Our persistent pest is a 7103 (apparently a generic 7.1 error). Any relation between that and my userID here is coincidental. This error is not reproduceable ... Nor is ours, so I don't have the rest of the error string at hand. Copy and Paste of content in the document, Inserting of new Elements into the document. Ours is usually on re-size of the bottom edge of a right run-in anchored frame, but also can happen on cut or paste, and sometimes just happens with no actions in progress (probably during auto-save). Frequently the crash itself crashes, no .recover file is created. More rarely, Save itself crashes, lock files all over, etc. Each idea is very appreciated. Since moving to FM8 on Unix might have its own problems, and we aren't in any hurry to move to FM9 or 10 on Windows (we have FM9 on Win), we live with it. Some tips: Save often, particularly before operations that correlate to crashes. After a crash, copy the .fm, .backup, .auto and .recover (we use a timestamp-named subdir for each crash (e.g. ./saves/2011-05-27a/), so we can roll back as far as needed. If you are using a content management system, this may be less necessary. Do not take the "open Recover file instead" option. The .recover file is likely corrupt or incomplete. Open the recently saved .fm (or .backup if the save crashed). Open the .recover separately, using it only to copy in recent changes that would otherwise have to be re-created. Assume that there is some latent problem in the .fm file. Don't be surprised if many days and pages later you find some text content tha$(*\&^~%. Delete it. Use your ./saves/ to recover it. I haven't really experimented with MIF washing of unstable documents to see if it helps. The next time a .fm goes fragile on me, I'll run some tests. ... View more

And it's worth noting that Search does work on Jive's own user forum ... Another thing that does indeed work on the internet - tracking. I'm now seeing banner ads for Jive when I visit other (non-Adobe) sites. I even have Flash turned off entirely. I presume this resulted from visiting Jive, but it could also have resulted from just typing the word here. ______ Privacy - we used to know what that was. ... View more