Re: Multiple search windows...

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

> REQUEST:
> Allow for and support multiple Find/Change windows. Each time you hit
> Ctrl+F or otherwise lauch the Find/Change, you get a new window. This
> way you can establish multiple search(/replace) criteria one time and
> have them available for as long as the windows are open.
> 
> REASON:
> Because searching for paragraph formats, character formats, paragraph
> tags, ..., special tags uses the same Find/Change window as does
> searching for normal text, the GUI becomes error prone and cumbersome.

There's another way to accomplish this that may be "better":
Have the Find window remember the searches made by the user and
allow them to be selected from a drop-down list. This would include
both the type of search and the associated text (if any), e.g.
 "Text: text string"
 "Paragraph Tag: Heading2"
 "Marker of type: index"
 "Unresolved cross-reference"
Guess how handy this would be in a final review stage where you want
to find or check a number of things in several files?

Or, at least, let each type of find operation remember its latest
associated text string, so that selecting a type would automatically
display an appropriate text string (the latest one used, or blank).
I mean, really, how often do you want to first search for the text
string "the shazamabing widget", then search for a Marker of Type
and have "the shazamabing widget" being proposed as the marker type???

There are several other improvements that can be made to the Find window,
such as grouping check box options vertically instead of horizontally
(which is a much better way to get an overview of and set options),
or having one button for searching forward and another for searching
backward (instead of a check box located the furthest away from the
Find button...)

If you use FM's search function often, and thereby are exposed to its
deficiencies, Glenn's suggestions and the ones above are quite natural
and should be part of any effort to improve the user interface.
We're not talking rocket science here, or anything that would need a
major rework of FM's inner workings. Just Do It(TM).


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Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
Technical Writer, Uppsala, Sweden
mailto:Thomas.Michanek@telia.com
http://go.to/framers/
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