Thanks Michael, but I just wanted to find a way to help newbies to work with DITA without becoming geeks. I will have to tell them not to bother with the lists of useless elements, just pick out the ones they need. And of course hire me to do some customizing of their DTDs and EDDs... Writing the file into DITA format obviously removes all FM-specific info from the file, as reopening the file shows the same full list of elements again. Oh well, there is something to be desired in new releases. I will check it on FM11 later today and see if I can shoot a feature request into the prerelease program. Ciao Jang ... View more

Hi Robert, Just wondering where you want the change to be effective: in DITA, anything concerning the output depends on the transformation rules for that particular output format (HTML, PDF etc), so you should look at the transformation rules rather than trying to find a solution inside FM - which is only an editing environment in the end or inside the DITA files - which are merely concerned with content, not formatting. Ciao Jang ... View more

I had one crash in FM9 when I included the Update TextInset command inside the loop that takes me through all text insets in the document. I guess it was pretty lethal for FM to update the textinset while the object pointing to that textinset was still being used inside the script. I then moved the Update command beyond the end of the loop and that works fine. There were no nested text insets in my source document, so I have not tried that either. But messing around with the textinset while at the same time relying on the objects pointing to the correct stuff inside the doc might not be too wise. Of course I don't know how Winfried's scripts are organized and I have not tried my script in FM8. Ciao Jang ... View more

Hi Michael, Thanks to your infos, my first ever FrameScript works beautifully, including the Update TextInset (ActiveDoc) at the end. My customer is already excited about the number of hours this is going to save them on manually re-importing the text insets for each of their 15 target languages. I wish all the consulting jobs were so easy !!! Ciao Jang ... View more

Hello Michael, This is more or less what I was afraid of. It would have been nice if FM had the decency of doing what you tell it to: with the Update References dialog showing the option to update automatic text insets you would expect it would just update them, not check whether FM feels it is necessary. Touching the external files may have all kinds of nasty effects on automatic backups, versioning etc. I don't want to change anything to those inset sources, as they are standard and should remain untouched / unchanged. So it looks like I will need to create a script to do what I feel FM should allow me to do. Oh well, it does make us FM pros a living, doesn't it ? Thanks for the quick and clear answer. Jang ... View more

Hello Lynne, I've been out of my office for a while, so that is why this reply is a little late. Although this would indeed create a structure that is valid when the header row cells are straddled, it would not remove the need for manually applying the straddle option, which is not what I want. I did remove the line between the columns (it had no real use in the message panels anyway) and it left me with a very thin white line between the two header cells. Hardly visible, but zooming in on the PDF reveals them. Not perfect, but good enough for now. As far as I can tell now, the only way to make the hazard statements look perfect (without the thin white line) and not involving manual labor is to write a little script that does this for all hazard statement headers in the book. But then this might cause unforeseen problems with transformations to other targets. So probably I won't bother at all. Thanks for the suggestion, though. Jang ... View more

The measurements in inches did not make any sense in my images, so I checked pixel sizes - after all the images are GIFs, so pixel dimensions are what counts - and sure enough: all the images with the extra line to the right had odd pixel widths. Changing them to even pixel widths cured the problem. This is crazy, but it did allow me to finish the PDF and send it to my customer. Strange thing is that the pixel height was also odd in many cases but did not cause an extra horizontal line. Maybe that is because, AFAIK, GIF images are defined as horizontal lines, i.e. the end of a line of pixels is always on the right side of the image. I would still like to know what crazy bug is causing the unwanted line effect, but not right now. Thanks a bundle, Is ! ... View more

Hi lsk2002, This is pretty amazing. I have not tried it yet as I am working on another job right now. I am wondering, though: the number you mention as the size of the image - is that inches or centimeters or can it be anything as long as the last digit is even ??? I did sign up for the framers list. Thanks for the link. Jang ... View more

Hello Peter, I am sorry, but that is not compliant to ANSI Z535 and also it lacks the freedom to add specific icons to messagepanels that are grouped into the same hazard statement (with one heading that shows the hazard level). In ANSI Z535, there are 4 very clearly defined hazard categories, although there may be a lot of specific hazards that can be grouped into these levels. The heading is described in a lot of detail and not to be messed with. In the meantime I have decided to drop the line between the rows and I will probably use a script to make the cells in the heading into one straddled cell, so it will look perfect. Thanks for the offer. Jang ... View more

Hi Michael, Oh, well. I had already figured out that this is not an option. I did remove the line between the rows, as it does not add any thing to the clarity of the message panels in my hazard statement table. But FM cannot handle two adjacent cells with graphic frames without adding a single hairline between them, even if I told the program that the border should be None. Something about the importance of frames for FM, I guess. I have only been able to remove the extra unwanted and uncalled-for hairline by straddling the cells (manually). Of course I will have to adapt the EDD to allow straddled cells in the header, but that is peanuts compared to the stuff I have been doing to make this design work in the first place. As I will have to create a small script to perform a series of necessary steps before a book can be published, and my hazard statement tables all have the exact same small problem, I will probably include a script that goes through the whole book and applies a straddle to any cells in the heading row of any hazard table. Being a perfectionist, writing that script before handing my stuff over to my customer will make me happier than not doing it and saving some time by delivering a solution that does not make me perfectly happy. When all the hard work for my current projects is done, I will try to publish an article on how to implement ANSI Z535 compliant hazard statements in structured FM documents. Might be useful for others, too. I will show you my solution at the tcworld fair, if you have some time for that. Ciao Jang ... View more

Hello Russ and Van, I was kind of worried that I was crossing the limits of what FM EDDs can do. It is not a big deal - I can use the one string to store all values, as I have been doing so far. It just looks a little ugly when the string gets longer and the substrings do not wrap nicely. Of course going fully XML and XSLT etc would be another option but that is overkill for this particular client and they won't pay for that. Making the output a little nicer to look at is not a high priority, as this particular output is only shown in a catalogue of repository items to be used internally by my cient, i.e. it will never show in publications for users. Thanks for confirming my intuition that I should stop searching for the holy grail... Jang ... View more

Hello again Michael, I tried the \x05 and it works like a breeze ! Thanks again. Apparently I was mistaken in assuming that I can suppress hyphenation via Text Range formatting, at least not if I want to keep my EDD free of any direct formatting. I can assign a character format, but in the Character Designer there seems to be no option to suppress hyphenation. This is handled on the paragraph level, and I do not want to suppress hyphenation for the entire paragraph just to keep my machine name from being cut down the middle. As I am not using roundtripping to XML for this client, the trick with the \x05 in the attribute value, combined with the Alt-0160 for the non-breaking space, does exactly what I need it to do. If I need to get into roundtripping later, I will have to find some kind of trick to preserve the suppressed hyphenation - probably by introducing an extra attribute in the BookVar element that controls it (and then gets translated into the correct preceding \x05 code by the Read-Write rules). Anyway, I already owed you a free dinner in Amsterdam, so now the drinks will be on me, too !  Ciao Jang ... View more

Hello Michael, Thanks for that code. I was trying the codes in the FrameMaker character set document, which dates back to version 7.0. It states an escape sequence, which does not work as it immediately closes the attributes panel. The other option, ctrl+space, did not work at all. But now that the non-breaking space is recognized, Frame nicely cuts the machine name down the middle. Is there another Alt code (or something else that does not involve the Esc key) to indicate that an attribute value should not be hyphenated ? I could of course define the BookVar element as a Text Range and then suppress the hyphenation via the character designer. But if there is an easier way via the attribute that would save me a bundle of work... ... View more

Thanks for the tips. Right-clicking is a nice one, since it depends where you click and there is no intuitive guidance on that. I do not think that this can be viewed as purely a documentation issue. It is a design issue: if there is an option to change screen modes, it should be included in the View menu, just like it was done in Photoshop. That is the obvious location where you would go look for it. And even in Full Screen Mode, using the Alt key brings up the menus, so there is an easy escape without having to consult the help files or forums to found out hidden tricks. As technical authors, we should not accept the blame when it is shoved on our plates by user interface designers who obviously made a mistake here. Yes, it should also have been included in the documentation but that is not the only action that should be taken. Another option of course is to take the feature out of FrameMaker altogether. Why would I want to enter Full Screen Mode in an editor, anyway? I know I did, as I was checking out features that I had not seen before. But what's the point of this feature for this program ? ... View more

In other Adobe applications, there is a Screen Mode submenu in the View menu. The programmers who put the button for switching screen modes into FM9 should have thought a couple of milliseconds before deciding those buttons were sufficient. When the menu bar is hidden, THERE IS NO BUTTON. Relying on escape sequences is something that smells of the ancient past, when we were hacking away in vi on a Unix machine with no graphical user interface. I really hate it when programmers DO NOT THINK TWICE about what they're doing. Also, they never told anyone about this, so it did not get included in the help for FM9, either. It took me about an hour to find out there is no easy way of getting my menu bar back except restarting FM. I do not memorize hundreds of escape sequences, nor am I ever planning on doing that. This feature stinks for FM, anyway. And yes, I am just a little bit angry. ... View more

Hi Michael, Do you have a pointer to a marker management plug-in that would do the trick ? I am working in FM8 but it would be nice if it also worked for FM9. Thx Jang ... View more

I found the svg2pdf.dll but not in the FM9 installation. I had to copy it over from an older FM8 installation together with the one line from the old maker.ini to make it work. I have no idea why the DLL was not in my installation, as there were never any options to choose which filters to install in the first place. So it really sounds like a bug in the installation package of FM9 to me. Still, I found my way around it. Ciao Jang ... View more

Hi Van, I do understand the problems with formatting that can be changed by authors and create a mess. There are a number of points that need to be taken into account when deciding on EDDs with or without formatting included. 1. Even if you do all formatting in the EDD, the authors can still mess it up, as the paragraph and character designer are available to them and they can create individual overrides. Of course you can then automatically re-apply the EDD as soon as the document gets saved or re-opened, but that is not the best way of dealing with your authors (it is if you want to drive them up the walls or out of the company). 2. EDDs are much more complicated to design than paragraph and character styles. They are also in different types of skills domains. I have seen documents with excellent EDDs (as far as the structure is concerned) but horrible formatting. Clearly they were created by good programmers with no talent for usability and esthetics. 3. EDDs cost much more to create and maintain, due to their complexity and the programmer-like skills required. Reuse of EDDs without formatting, in several companies who each have their own style preferences, is highly preferable and less costly. 4. Reusing small documents in various publications is something that should be a major goal when writing stuff in the first place. And having various publications immediately raises the issue of having different formatting. Keeping the formatting separated from the EDD increases reusability. The point you are making about keeping the same styles throughout the company is something you could still enforce, by automatically re-importing a style template before anything goes into print and then overriding all manual overrides. This is something you will still have to do if you put all formatting in the EDD. What would be really useful for Adobe to implement is an option to freeze the various style catalogs, i.e. make the paragraph and character designer (as well as the cross-reference styles etc.) read-only or even hidden from users who do not have sufficient privileges. That is probably the only way you can get your authors to stop messing around with the formatting of documents and concentrate on contents instead. I guess this discussion should be continued elsewhere, but I don't have the time to find another thread right now. If someone knows where the discussion was or is being held elsewhere, please point me to the right thread. Kind regards from Amsterdam Jang ... View more

Hello stickner and Russ, Forgive me if I am missing some aspects of XML to FM importing - I have read the structured apps guide but have not come to that point yet in putting all that info into practice. I have, however, developed an EDD from scratch with the option of XML roundtripping in the back of my mind. Doing paragraph and character styles formatting as part of the EDD is something that raises a lot of issues for export and import, and I tried to find a way of avoiding most of these. My EDD only uses attributes and occasional prefix and suffix rules to define stuff that should not be editable. All the other formatting, however, is done via the paragraph and character styles catalogues in the FM files. They are not passed to XML and back, but in the EDD all elements are mapped to specific paragraph and character styles. I believe that those rules are kept when exporting to XML (and importing from XML - if the translation rules are written correctly). So this basically cuts the direct dependency between content (in the elements, their attributes and their structure rules - which is roundtrippable to XML) and formatting (which is done via the paragraph and character styles). Of course, this enables the editor working in FM to change the formatting, but that is something I specifically wanted to have, as I do not want my clients to screw up the EDD when trying to make small changes to the paragraph and character styles. I want them to make global changes to the styles without touching the document structure that is laid down in the EDD. So, if I am correctly judging all aspects of the translation between XML and Frame, this could help you in circumvening the whole problem. You just need to have the EDD map the imported elements to the correct paragraph and character formatting tags and then import those paragraph and character styles from the old FM document to get the same formatting you had in the first place. Jang ... View more

Hello Michael, If I understand you (and Rick's earlier post) correctly, or if I translate the idea to what my customer would require, I would have to use the following procedure: 1. Make all files single-sided on A3 size landscape, with the usual header and footer artwork on the left and right pages as if they were two A4 portrait pages. Then create a side-head area that spans the entire left page. 2. Simply write my text in the text flow to the right and place images in the side-head aligned to the left. 3. Post-process the A3-sized landscape pages into A4-sized portrait pages by cutting each page in two. 4. Fiddling around with the page numbers so that they count twice as fast as the original. 5. Making sure the cross-references are corrected because of the changed pagenumbers. I am not sure how to automatically do step 3 and 4. Any ideas ? Ciao Jang ... View more

Hello again Art, I am currently investigating creating a FrameScript that will correct the paths - this has the added advantage that the script can tell me which images are missing, in a list instead of the very limited "Missing File" dialog (which does not even resize to see the full path and thereby creates some confusion sometimes). Also, when Frame finds a file by me pointing to the correct path it assumes that all further files will be in the same place. And since I have files with the same names (but different contents - as they are used in different machine modules), this causes unexpected errors. And of course you are right in your comment about the translation agency: the previous one that I used responded to my problem reports by changing their methods of exporting and importing. But they are too expensive for the taste of my customers. Ah well, I am getting more out of it this way and my customer knows that, but I hate stupid work even if I do get paid for it. Ciao again Jang ... View more