Re: catalog cleanup vs. conditional text

[Dan Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Note: This thread originated on BradFramers. I am posting
my reply only to Free Framers.
===========================
At 02:29 PM 7/2/00 -0400, Suzanne Bolduc wrote:
>Hi!
>I searched the FM user guide, the Framers' archive and Adobe's support
>database, and can't seem to find anything related to my problem.
>
>Whenever I'm handed a book with paragraph and character tag catalogs
>cluttered with countless unused and useless legacy tags, I have this
>urge and I clean it up by wiping the catalogs and using the Create and
>Apply Formats utility. Sometimes, I end up with some character tags
>labeled Charfmt, Charfmt1, Charfmt2 (normally just one or two...) which
>I get rid of by searching for them and manually applying the Default
>Paragraph Font tag instead.
================================================
Why would you wipe these char formats out? What these instances of
CharFmt are telling you is that people have been improperly using the Character
Designer and/or the Format > Style, Format > Size, and Format > Font
menu options instead of character format tags to apply special formatting to
text strings within paragraphs. Each unique CharFmt tag indicates a unique
combination of font/size/weight/angle/weight etc. that was applied
to text stings within one or more paragraphs.

For example, if people have applied ad hoc Bold overrides to text strings
within paragraph formats which differ in font or font size, a unique
CharFmt tag will be created for each unique combination of font, font size,
and Bold that was found during the Create and Apply Formats action.

Consequently, each instance of each CharFmt tag should be analyzed to
determine the appropriate pre-defined character format in the character
catalog (Bold in this example) to apply in place of each instance of
each CharFmt tag..
=====================================================
>Now, with a document featuring conditional text, this is another story.
>I just ended up with 68 different variations of Charfmt!!!
>
>With the Find/Change dialog, automatically applying the Default
>Paragraph Font tag doesn't seem possible: the Change field doesn't offer
>"Character tag" and the Character Format dialog doesn't offer the Def.
>Par. Font tag. Am I missing something?
=============================================
For the reasons cited above, you shouldn't be trying to wipe them out. And
even if you did want to do this, there's no way to do a blanket wipeout using
Find/Change, because no single replacement format would work (i.e.,
Default Paragraph Font means something different in each different
paragraph tag).

Nor can you place your cursor in text that has applied to
it a predefined character format tag (e.g., a tag named Bold),
and use Edit > CopySpecial > Character Format, to copy that format to the
clipboard. You might think that you could then choose Change By
Pasting in the Find/Change dialog, and then search for and replace
all CharFmt instances that apply bold with the predefined Bold
character tag that is on the clipboard, but you can't.

The reason you can't do this is that all the As Is settings in the predefined
character format are changed to their actual values in the instance you
copied to the clipboard. If, for example, the Bold character format
you copied to the clipboard happened to be in a paragraph format that uses
12-point Times, then the replacement format will be 12-point Times Bold in
every instance where CharFmt is replaced with the Bold character tag.
Thus if some of these occurrences of CharFmt are in paragraphs that use
different fonts and sizes, the applied format will change the text to Times
12-point in every case, making the situation even worse than before, because
you cannot restore these instances of Bold to the correct font and
font size by reapplying the Bold tag to them (remember, in the actual character
format definition), the font and font size are correctly set to As Is.

So, as you can see from the foregoing, there is no workable automated way
to either wipe out or fix instances of CharFmt tags by using Find/Change
to restore them to the default paragraph format, or to replace them 
automatically
with predefined character formats that were in the Character Catalog prior to
taking the Create and Apply Formats Action. Thus you can only
use Find/Change to find each instance of CharFmt. You must then
evaluate each found instance, decide what to do, and then manually do it.

Nevertheless, using Create and Apply Formats has identified a problem
(extensive application of unauthorized format overrides to text strings)
that you may not have realized you had. The nasty process needed to fix these
discrepancies should strongly motivate you to take all steps that are 
required to
assure that absolutely no ad hoc formatting of text strings is permitted
in your documents.


====================
| Nullius in Verba |
====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory@primenet.com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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