More FM Enhancement requests

[Jay Smith <jay@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you to Roger Jones for an superb list of needed FM enhancements.

I have a couple to add...

ALLOWING "SUB-FLOWs" WITH DIFFERENT NUMBER OF COLUMNS THAN MAIN FLOW.

While I have never been able to quickly and easily describe this concept, I
shall try once again to bring this one up.  For a while, on the group, it was
discussed as the "2-3-2 column flow" problem.

What is needed is the ability to change from one quantity (main flow) of
columns to another quantity (sub flow) and back again (main flow).  Text in
the first part of the main flow flows and fills/balances up to the point of
change, just as it would prior to a page spanning illustration.  Additions to
the first part pushes the point of change down the book.  

At the point of change the "sub-flow" starts, with a different quantity of
columns, and continues, filling and balancing per page, growing & shrinking as
necessary, until the change-back point where the sub-flow content stops and
the main flow content resumes. 

Within the sub-flow, as text is added/removed the size of the sub-flow grows
and shrinks, pushing along the next part of the main flow as it does.

When the sub-flow ends, the main flow resumes.  Note that the sub-flow is part
of the main flow -- main flow content does NOT flow PAST the sub-flow, but
pushes the sub-flow along instead, like pushing along an anchored object
(though one which is somewhat elastic)

As the sub-flow expands over page breaks, it fills and balances in normal flow
behavior.  

This would allow the following type of application:  A book containing pages
with a main-flow having 2 columns.  Then a sub-flow with 5 columns.  In the
sub-flow, there is a table of width equal to or less than the width of one
sub-flow column.  As rows are added to this table, the table grows (and the
sub-flow along with it), filling/flowing in serpentine fashion to the bottom
of the page, then to the top of the next page, etc.

Without the functionality I have described, group members have agreed that
there is absolutely no way to have an application such as I have described
without a tremendous amount of manual, error-prone work involving anchored
frames & text frames requiring constant manual size changes, cutting and
pasting content between text frames, content accidentally becoming invisible,
etc.  It is a mess.


TAG APPLICATION BASED ON TEXTUAL CONTENT.

An enhanced find/replace function.  We current write this in FrameScript. 
Find all occurrences of ("xxxitalicon" and "xxxitalicoff") or "xxxheadline"
(i.e. some 'unique' character string) and apply either a character tag
(between the 'on' and 'off') or paragraph tag, as desired.  In the process,
delete the character strings.  Character tagging requires an 'on' and an 'off'
string.  [We use this technique with FrameScript to auto-tag huge amounts of
text coming from database output and word processor files in seconds/minutes.]

Building a specialized FM file, or reference page, that listed several/many of
these operations would allow for automating the process.


MACRO-IZING FRAMEMAKER, INCLUDING RECORDING CAPABILITY.

For Win95.  Enough said.  FrameScript is doing a great job, and will continue
to get better.  Maybe (how?) FrameScript will eventually have recording
capability ala WordPerfect8.  I feel that this type of capability is extremely
important to the longterm success and adoption of FM -- my experience with
WordPerfect8 has been that once we (my office) became efficient in the WP
macro facility, we started using WP for all sorts of jobs that would never
have occurred to me; in that way, WP wormed it's way deep into the operations
of my whole company.

-- 
Jay Smith

e-mail: jay@jaysmith.com

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