Two possibly useful items

[Bill Briggs <web@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

fframers,

A couple of things to get us back to the business of framemaker.

A while back, in the days of Phong, when we didn't have a web site, I did a
retrofit on the flowchart primitives that ship with frame for use in a
project I was working on.  The ones that ship are poorly executed graphics
that are next to useless as they are.  Putting a flowchart together with
them would be a tedious exercise.  They were retrofitted with properly done
drawings, text frames, and tables that automatically centre the text, and a
readme file that gives a few tips on how to use them.  Now it's relatively
easy to string together flowcharts and not have to constantly tinker with
the text position, etc.  Once the web site is up I'll provide a copy of the
revamped primitives and the readme file for downloading.  There are several
advantages to using the native frame-drawn components over some third party
software when making flowcharts.  At least that's what we found after
trying it both ways.

Something else that will be coming for the web site will be the definitive
tool to sort out the old "blank page insertion problem" in two-sided
multifile books.  It's an interaction matrix that shows what properties
override when there are conflicting settings among the three key ones.
It's a bit large and complicated and has taken quite a while to test, but
it's almost done.  I should have time to get it finished in the next few
weeks.  When it's up it can stand as the FAQ for such problems.  It should
point you in the right direction to diagnose and solve all such problems.
Would you prefer to see it in a Frame file or PDF?  Doesn't matter to me.
It will have been tested on Mac FrameMaker+SGML, so if anyone ever finds a
different result on a different platform, I'd like to know about it so a
note can be added to that effect.

- web



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