Re: Clear char overrides, keep char formats?

["Thomas Michanek" <thomas.michanek@xxxxxxxxx>]

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From: "Graham Wideman" <grahamlist@diagramantics.com>
> I've got a multi-hundred page doc that has certain special words and
> phrases nicely tagged with character formats, but intermixed are other
> areas that have overrides with various combos of bold, font size and so on
> that I need to get rid of.
> I expected to find a command that gets rid of manual character overrides --
> but can't seem to find it. 
> [...]
> Question remains though -- I need to remove character overrides but
> preserve applied character formats.
> 1) Applying Default Para Font removes both char overrides and char formats
> 2) Import formats doesn't appear to do anything to either char overrides or
> char formats.

First of all, you should realize that there are 3 different situations:
a) You apply a character tag, but no character overrides to the text.
b) You apply a character tag *and* a character override to the text.
c) You apply a manual character override without using any character tag.

A special case of b) above is when you apply a character tag Alpha to a word,
and then apply another character tag Beta to the same word. Since FrameMaker
can only store a single tag name for a character formatting, this is treated
as a character override. The last applied tag name (Beta) is stored, and the
other tag's formatting is treated as an override. You get the exact same
result if you apply a character override manually to that tag. (You can verify
this by saving the file to MIF and look at how the formatting is stored.)

Your statement 2) above isn't entirely correct: changes in character tag
definitions are imported and applied correctly. However, as you state,
character overrides are not removed in the extent you would expect. This
is because an override to a character tag is defined in a limited way.
You can see this in the way the asterisk indicator in the status bar for tags
works for character tags. If you apply a manual character override to a word
tagged with a character tag, no asterisk may appear, even though you would
consider this an override. It's only when you apply character formatting that
"contradicts" the tag's definition that an asterisk appear. For instance, if
the tag defines Weight as "As is" and you later apply Bold manually, this is
*not* considered an override to the tag. If, however, the tag defined Weight
as "Regular", it would be considered a tag override (and an asterisk appear).

Regardless if you understood the above or not :-)
there is no functionality in standard FM for removing character overrides only.
You can probably find a FrameScript or a plug-in that does it for you, or you
could run some editing script on the MIF file. I can help you with such a
script, *if* you happen to have access to UNIX. Otherwise, I seem to recall a
utility called MIFbrowse that someone familiar with MIF has made ;-)

Hope this helps,

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Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
mailto:Thomas.Michanek@telia.com   (Sweden)
http://go.to/framers/  (updated on Oct. 11)
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