DITA is just a way to store the structured content and as such has no built-in tools to make anything appear in heaers or footers of a PDF document. Simply because DITA is only the content, and everything else needs to be created from either the DITA source itself or from external sources of information.   Still, you can use FrameMaker's rendering capabilities to pick up some text that will have to be inside your DITA file and show it as part of the header and footer via Running H/F variables.    I would suggest creating a special paragraph format that uses 2pt font size, 0 pt fixed linespacing, no space above and below, and white font color (so that it becomes invisible on the content pages and takes up no space in your layout. With the ditaval files, you can control the content of this invisible paragraph. Make sure it is at the start of your topic, e.g. as a titlealts element following your title. Then define your template with Running H/F variables to pick yp the content of the titlealts paragraph.   In this way, all the content is part of the DITA file, even though some content is not visible as such, but only created to style the header and footer of your pages. ... View more

There may also be an output buffer overrun. Try adding some pause in the loop after incrementing the i variable: if( i % 1000 == 0 ) { var n = 0; while( n < 1000 ) n++; } In my first attempts, writing only the command number did not cause any issues. Adding more properties started to cause issues at some point. Then introducing the wait cycle after every 1000 commands allowed the script to terminate correctly. I have seen output buffer overruns in other scripts in the past, so this is something to be aware of when creating massive output flows. ... View more

This snippet of DITA is turned into this rendering: When I manually set the height and width to the values from the DITA file, the image size is correct. ... View more

Hello Rick, Of course tables can be converted to SVG (I would be able to create a script for this), but I am not sure if this would solve your problems. SVGs require time to render in FM, just like tables do. Also, you would lose the option to edit anything in the tables, and repeating headers when tables span a page break would involve quite a lot of additional work. There might be other ways to solve the problem. If you want you can contact me, possibly sending me a file that you are facing problems with, so I can figure out if there are other solutions. Kind regards from Amsterdam Jang ... View more

With the pointers from Rick and Klaus, I managed to adapt the BookErrorLog to do what I wanted it to do. It is, as Klaus indicated, simply a FrameMaker document which is opened from the fminit directory. And even though it is read-only, I can still make changes to it via scripting. So now my conversion log has exactly that title, and all issues that were found are hyperlinked to the location where they were found.  ... View more

Thanks Rick, that is very helpful info. I will have a go at repurposing the BookErrorLog for my needs Kind regards Jang ... View more

Hello Klaus, I also found only those two ErrorLog clients. I was already thinking about creating my own template and making it read-only after inserting my error messages into it. So I can experiment with the available templates in the fminit directory as you mention. Thanks for that info. Jang ... View more

I tried to find out if the error log is a read-only FM document by checking app.ActiveDoc but that object is invalid. Does that have to do with the read-only status of this document, then ?   There are other error logs that behave in the same way (like when importing EDD into a document and some errors or warnings are generated). Surely they do not use the 'BookErrorLog' client, so this would imply there are a bunch of those ErrorLog clients for various purposes? ... View more

Tabs are not reliable in any output and they are not really reliable in FM, either. I have seen many authors use tabs to do alignment in MS Word, FM and other editors and it really never works out in all the output formats. What you should do is replace all tabs with a number of non-breaking spaces and make sure the code samples are using a monospace font such as Courier (which they probably already are). Of course this will turn out to be a huge task, as not all tabs should become the same number of non-breaking spaces (which is the real cause of the problem). If your code samples use a specific paragraph tag without overrides to the tab positions, this can be scripted, so that at least your current code samples have the correct styling in place. Then it is a matter of checking whether a sequence of non-breaking spaces survives the built-in HTML5 output process. There is a decent chance that this will be the case. Going forward you should really remove the tabs from the monospace paragraph format and train your authors to not use tabs in their code samples at all, or export the code samples after normalising the tabs to whitespace characters.  ... View more

Then it might be better to fill out a feature request, not a bug report. It is not a bug and when it is filed in the wrong category it may end up being ignored completely. ... View more

ESTK is no longer maintained by Adobe as all scripting support has moved to the ExtendScript Extension for Visual Studio Code. I have tried this package and it does work OK, but I do miss a couple of functions from ESTK. But there is nothing we can do about it. It is a little anoying that some features in JSX that work in ESTK need to be changed to work in the Javascript support of Visual Studio Code. Some things, like include files, have been implemented in a crappy way in VS Code. But again, there is nothing we can hope to do about this as the product is created by Microsoft and the community of scripters for FrameMaker is almost infinitely small comapred to their main user base. So, you can forget about newer versions of ESTK - there will not be new versions. If you want to keep using ESTK the version you have is what you will have to work with. ... View more

Hello Rick,   If you add some data object into the metadata in one (or even all) of your topics that pick up different values depending on the DITAVAL, you can easily pick that metadata up in ExtendScript and as metadata will not show up in the content it does not disrupt your output.   In this way you do not even need to talk to AEM from your ExtendScript.   Ciao from Amsterdam   Jang ... View more

How are you pulling in the black color - is that a property of the text frame ? More importantly: what are you trying to achieve with the text frame ? There is no context here so it is hard to give you a good solution. If you want to have some kind of heading with fancy background color, I would suggest using a one cell table, give it the required background color and centering the text vertically and horizontally. If there are reasons why this would not work, there will be other solutions, but you will have to be much more precise in describing the situation. ... View more

As is mentioned in the discussion, this is a standard technique for warnings, where the symbol is pulled in from the reference pages and the text is on the body page. I have seen lots of FM users who never figured out how to use the Sidehead. Well, this is exactly what you should be using. The handling is a bit dependent on whether you are still using unstructured FM (which you should really abandon as we live in the 21st century) or structured FM. In the first case, you will have to enter an empty paragraph that brings in the note icon from the reference page (via Frame Below) and the next paragraph is the text for the note. Make all of your regular paragraphs In Column and make the note icon paragraph in Sidehead. With structured FM, you can create a <note> element that automatically puts an <icon> and a <text> element into your document. And you can work via the EDD to make the icon dependent on the type attribute of the <note>.  ... View more

To me it looks like these are used for the PDF review feature in FM, which would make it impossible to remove them from the product, as that would remove the option to import PDF review comments. If you are not using PDF reviews, the tags might be there but no content will be marked with it, which IMHO should not cause any problem at all. I will not vote for this as I believe this is not a bug at all. ... View more

Even though FrameMaker allows all kinds of operations on graphics, it does not mean this is still a good idea for today's content creation. These types of graphic objects are virtually impossible to translate (translators do not work in FrameMaker) and cannot be used when moving to structured content (based on XML storage).   The better strategy is creating the complete graphic with callouts in an external application like Adobe Illustrator and saving it to SVG, then import it into your FrameMaker files. In that way, you keep the text available for translation, editing etc. without requiring a complete reworking of the graphics in FrameMaker. Also, you have much better control over all the elements in your combined graphic than any FrameMaker graphic operations allow. ... View more

I checked this and tried a couple of tricks to see if I could make it work. It does not. I opened the same topic in oXygen and the relative column sizes came out fine. So you should file this as a bug in FrameMaker's DITA simpletable implementation. Of course it will take time to get fixed. In the meantime you can use the table - which works as it should. ... View more

Yes, on second look I saw the author name of the script, too. Michael has stopped scripting a long time ago, and has taken a job at Docufy. I checked briefly how to do a PDF import in ExtendScript and it should be doable to create a new script that does this. I just don't know how to figure out the number of pages in a PDF file from the scripting interface. Michael used some Acrobat connector to do this. If there is another method that does not require communication to another component a script should be fairly easy to create.   Having said that, I will not have time for this, but if there is a small budget available one of the script gurus on this forum (Klaus, Rick, Ian?) might be able to make it work.   Good luck ... View more

I quickly browsed over your script and it is a lot of code. Also most of the people on this forum are using ESTK instead of FrameScript. So I doubt you will get an answer about exactly why the script no longer seems to be working in FM2020. If you developed the script yourself, you should be able to figure out what has changed, or at least where the script goes wrong in FM2020. If someone developed the script for you, that would be the person to ask about the upgrades required to make it work again.    Good luck ... View more

I do understand your frustration about my suggestion of saving to XML and the extra work that would involve. For my customers I have always started with the XML, then mapped it to the required styles in the EDD, then started the conversion (automated or manual) from unstructured to structured FrameMaker, then got the authors to work with the structured interface. It saves a lot of hassle with the format change lists. Still, to move to XML saved documents it is not required to get rid of the format change lists and move back to paragraph styles. The EDD can remain as it is. The only extras you need are a DTD and a resd-write rules text file. For the authors, nothing changes except the files use the .xml extension rather than .fm ... View more

If you would complete the use of Structured FrameMaker by saving all content to XML, your authors would very quickly stop using the Paragraph Designer (and others) to make changes to formats, as they are lost as soon as the file is re-opened from the XML source. With that, you can - and should - keep mapping elements to paragraph formats and base the bookmark levels on the formats. Saving to XML also opens a host of opportunities for automated reuse via XSLT.  ... View more

Thanks for the detailed explanation and pointer to documents and scripts. I am concentrating on completing the FrameMaker side of the scripting now, but will return to the automation pipeline with Illustrator early next year. I will update this topic when I find the method, so that others can also benefit from my results. ... View more

No, I ran it from FM (on my virtual PC) to Illustrtor (on the same virtual PC). It should also work across to the Mac OS, but that would introduce another interface that I have no control over. The final application will run on a true PC, anyway. I still need to get AI installed on my native Windows PC so that I can try the setup there. Will let you know if that turns out to be successful. ... View more

The script in AI opens a document, so no, that would not change anything. The script works fine when I run it from Visual Studio Code. Nothing happens when trying to run this from FM. But thanks for the suggestion. ... View more

If the content to be deleted is inside a <draft-comment> the remaining content after filtering remains valid DITA. So there should be no danger of running into the problems you indicate. It is a different matter when using filters that remove a table cell from the structure, of course. Using FM Conditional Tags is less reliable in this respect. ... View more

With a bit of extra coding (ExtendScript, Javascript and HTML), I created a welcome screen that lists the documents to be edited by the authors. Once a document is marked as done, it will no longer show up. All of the entires are handled by a database somewhere on the intranet. Of course this takes more than just a couple of entries in the maker.ini or a fixed HTML page to replace the existing welcome screen, but it does make the screen into an asset rather than a nuisance. ... View more

As you are using FMPS you could use the built-in capabilies of FM to remove any draft-comment from the files before they are published. There is no need to make that change in all templates. Just have a very simple XSL that removes the draft-comment before the file is opened in FMPS for publishing. The structured application that handles the XML file allows adding such an XSL to be executed just before loading the XML into FM. These changes are not saved back to the XML file, as FMPS will not perform a save on files to be published.   The XSL is a very straightforward identity transform with one extra template removing the draft-comment. ... View more