Long, but not OT: The Life of Samuel Johnson

["Slobodan Despot" <sdespot@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

This is a short account of a horrific experience.(Impatient and WAP
writers: do not read this.)

We are publishing the first complete translation of James Boswell's "Life
of Samuel Johnson" in French. This monument of literature and history is
a 850 page, B5 book, with 549 footnotes.
>From typing to layout, everything is FM. This time I sincerely regret it!
Some original footnotes were longer than a page: we considered smuggling
them as Annex documents, but then the book's structure would be altered
for merely technical reasons!
Anyway, the rest of the notes would uncontrollably wander, as we all
know, from page to page, looking for a free place to stand unbroken.
Well: the translator, and we at the publishing house, agreed not to let
people read such an ugly thing. In literary books, misplaced footnotes DO
matter.

Eventually we decided to convert all footnotes to endnotes. But how?
Working on a Mac, we found no other resource but to manipulate the huge
MIF file (ten million chars) with a text editor in order to extract the
footnotes from their hidden nest and mark them as normal text.
Then we inscribed manually all footnote numbers just after the FNote
markers, and removed the latter. Then we created a paratag based on the
Footnote tag to autonumber all the first paragraphs of all those newly
created endnotes.
Then we checked it all through, built a book, sent to print. 
This basic operation took us 12 hours to do... and it is certainly not
error-proof. It would have been faster and more secure if we had pulled
it all through the MSWord-QuarkXpress process. (This I tried, but the
dirty rtf obtained from FM after a couple of crashes had to be entirely
reformatted.)

Sure, I did something wrong. But I am an end user, and a DTP program for
"structured and long documents" should fulfill my needs without forcing
me to dive into all the "cookbooks" sold around.

And, yes, I know that "Resolving FrameMaker's footnote bug would involve
a heavy in-depth rewriting", as the gurus say. But would it be SO heavy
to, at least, allow the user to convert these damned footnotes to cross-
referenced paragraphs? Is there such an impeachment for that, too? And -
for the 100th time - how can a firm go on selling a DTP program with such
an obvious bug, without even trying to propose humane workarounds?

(I downloaded the FM7/Mac trial. Nothing new for us ordinary, no-xml,
paper-printing users. FM6, at least, had improved book building features.
I sure shall not upgrade anymore until there is a medicine for the Samuel
Johnson nightmare.)

Slobodan Despot 

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