FM enhancement suggestion

[Jay Smith <jay@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mr. Hilton,

I applaud your recent efforts to increase Framers <--> Adobe communication. 
Whether or not it will actually do good (I hope so!), it DOES FEEL BETTER.

Suggestion: 

I know that this has come up time and time again in the Framer groups (folks,
please don't tell me about keystrokes, assigning/reassigning function keys,
etc. -- I know about these methods)...

I have just spent several days editing an author's table content in FM (556 on
Win95) and thus am in a "special mood" (Make my day!) to make the following
suggestion.

  PLEASE enable various keys to "work" IN TABLE CELLS, along the following
lines:

  When you are on the LAST line in a table cell, the Down Cursor
  "should" take you to the cell below -- or out of the table, if
  you are in the last row.

  When you are on the FIRST line in a table cell, the Up Cursor
  "should" take you to the cell above -- or out of the table, if
  you are in the first row.

  Right/Left Cursors "should" move to the cell Right/Left 
  when you are at the end/beginning of the text flow in a cell.

  The End & Home keys "should" work such that doubling the End & Home keys
will
  take you to the (End) beginning of contents of the last cell in row and
  (Home) beginning of contents of the first cell in row.  

  Escape (or Ctrl or Alt) [i.e. a SINGLE keystroke] followed by one of
  the Cursor keys "should" jump you to a point (not sure where) in the 
  appropriate adjacent cell, regardless of where cursor is located in
  the current cell.

I am sure that there are other movements to consider as well.

In my humble opinion, WordPerfect's (8 on Win95) cursor movement in tables is
an excellent model of an outstanding user interface.  (However, I hate WP8's
column resizing method.)

I make the assumption that you have or do use FM yourself.  I know that it
perhaps not a reasonable assumption -- you have other responsibilities than to
do your own document preparation.  However, if you do not use it, you "should"
become acquainted enough to know the pain an anguish that FM'ers sometimes
experience.

With this in mind, I VERY STRONGLY SUGGEST that you spend at least 30 minutes
(you won't get the "real simulated feel" of text editing otherwise) editing
someone else's tables IN FM.  See what kind of mood you are in after that! 
(But don't take it out on other employees, family, pets, etc.;  it is best to
go to your kick-boxing workout after this exercise.)

KUDOS:  The one thing that I LOVE about working with FM tables is that
resizing any one column does NOT change the size of adjacent columns.  (When
we have to work with tables from a WP document, we do all possible text
editing in the WP program; then move the tables to FM and do all the column
width manipulation in FM.)

Thanks for listening.

-- 
Jay Smith

e-mail: jay@jaysmith.com

Jay Smith & Associates
P.O. Box 650
Snow Camp, NC  27349  USA

Phone: Int+US+336-376-9991
Toll-Free Phone in US & Canada:
	1-800-447-8267
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