SUMMARY: Updating 5.5.6 books to 6.0

[Arianna@xxxxxxxx]

Hello all,

Here's the summary to my post from a few days ago:


THE QUESTION:   Were there any issues encountered when upgrading Frame 5.5
book files to 6.0?

THE SHORT OF IT:  Three people responded, all of whom had to do a little
reworking with chapter numbering or page numbering.  All of them also stated
(either directly or indirectly) that the new features were worth the work.
For details and background, read on...

THE LONG OF IT:

Chris Despopoulos [cud@arrakis.es] wrote:
I had a project that involved two 1,000 ] page manuals, both of them sharing
a single, global index.  My only troubles were in the changes to
numbering...  Because this was a complex process.  I had 3 books, one for
each of the two
manuals, and one global one to generate the global indexes (I had two...
One for topics, and one for reserved names and other programmie stuff.)
What 6.0 does is make it so that the settings for numbering in a book
component is always the same as the setting for the numbering in a document.
I had previously *used* the fact that Maker 5.5 does *not* make these the
same.  And so, I had quite a time working around this change and
re-arranging my process.  
Other than that, I had no problems.  PDF is smaller...  You have to run a
command over legacy documents to have them take advantage of the smaller PDF
size, but that all works very well.  And changing names of components in a
book -
finally that is easy to do (updates xrefs and other things to work with the
new names).  And of course, find & spell across books.


Terry Smith [Terry_Smith@neonsys.com] wrote:
We have upgraded to FrameMaker 6 here and it was mostly painless. However,
if you use folio-by-chapter page numbering, you will definitely hit some
snags. 

When you open your existing books in FrameMaker 6, you will see messages
about the new chapter number variable. Within the files themselves, the page
numbering will probably still look okay if you set your book up in a typical
manner. However, if you used page numbering like v,vi,vii in your preface,
the preface's numbers in the table of contents will look like v-v,vi-vi,
vii-vii.

To fix this problem, do the following:
1) Create new heading styles for the preface (for example, copy heading1 to
heading1preface).
2) From the Edit menu, select Update Book to generate the book.
3) Add the new styles to the setup for the table of contents.
4) Edit the formatting on the table of contents reference page for the new
(and
possibly also for existing) heading styles. The numbering for the preface
should
use only the <pagenum> building block; the numbering for chapters and
appendices
should use <chapnum>-<pagenum>. (As always, be sure to use a non-breaking
hyphen
between the chapter number and the page number.)

The two new features I like best about FrameMaker 6:
* The ability to rename a file within a book. You no longer need to delete
the file, rename the file, readd the file, and then fix all the broken cross
references.

* Adding new styles to the table of contents setup is much easier. With
FrameMaker 5, every file was scanned for styles the first time you updated
the book. If you added a brand new style to your chapters, it wouldn't
appear in the list of
styles you could add to your table of contents setup. To make the new style
appear,you had to add the new style to the first file in the book (usually
the title page) and then update the book. Now, you can add styles whenever
you like: FrameMaker 6 always rescans the paragraph styles when you update
the book. If you use folio-by-chapter numbering, you will probably need to
create new styles (as described above) to fix your table of contents, so you
will appreciate this new capability right away.

Daily, Marilyn [marilyn.daily@pscnet.com] wrote:

I've brought several books from Frame 5.5.6 into Frame 6 with no problems
other than having to adjust some of the page and chapter numbering
sequences. Since Frame 6 has a <$chapnum> variable, anywhere you have a
chapter number in cross-refs, masterpages, etc, you will need to update them
to use the new variable.

I found the difficulty well worth it as the new variable is quite helpful
and all the new book-wide capabilities override any problems I've had so
far. I've been using Frame 6 for almost 3 months.


Thanks for the responses!
Arianna


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