FrameMaker Enhancement Request

[Dan Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

IMPROVING THE CREATE AND APPLY FORMATS CAPABILITY

ANALYSIS OF THE PROBLEM
This FrameMaker feature offers a powerful capability to remove all ad-hoc
character and paragraph format overrides by creating new format tags for
each distinct ad-hoc override. However, there are two major problems in
using this capability for that purpose:

1. Variations in paragraph formats resulting solely from forced page or
column breaks cause new paragraph formats to be created. By contrast, the
Import formats capability provides an option to ignore manual breaks.

2. The Create and Apply Formats action can only be performed on individual
files, not books. Consequently, new paragraph and character formats created
by this action can produce new format tags having the same name (e.g.,
Body1, CharFmt1) in each file of a book, but these tags will have different
formats in each file. This makes it impossible to globally update formats in
all files of a book from one of those files.

PROPOSED SOLUTION
1. Provide an option in the Create and Apply Formats dialog to ignore page
and column breaks.

2. Allow the Create and Apply Formats action to be performed at the book
level, so that each new paragraph and character tag that is created defines
an unique book-wide format. Each such new tag would be added to the
applicable catalog of all files in the book, thereby allowing any file in
the book to be used to globally update all files in the book.

For example, in a book file having four files (A, B, C, and D), if an
identical format variation in paragraph tag Body was found only in files A
and B, it would produce a new paragraph tag named Body1 which would specify
a common format for all the instances of that format variation in files A
and B. The new Body1 format would be added to the paragraph catalogs in
files A, B, C, and D, and no other new paragraph tag created in those four
files would be named Body1. But, if file D has a preexisting tag named
Body1, then the new tag would be named Body2 instead of Body1. This means
that the Create and Apply Formats action on a book file must begin by
compiling a list of all preexisting paragraph and character tags across all
files in the book, so that all new tags  created for format overrides would
have names that differ from preexisting tagnames.
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     | Nullius in Verba |
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Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory@primenet.com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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