I recently contributed an article on my favorite FrameMaker tips to Indus, the newsletter of the India chapter of STC. Check out the article here!
FrameMaker tips article in Indus
May 10th, 2010 Posted in Announcements, Technical Communication Suite, Tips and Tricks, Troubleshooting
Let’s discuss an easy way to embed a file-level TOC in a FrameMaker document. We’ll generate a standalone TOC for the document and then import it by reference into the same document.
Here’s how:
- Open the FrameMaker document.
- Click Special > Table of Contents. When FrameMaker prompts if you want to create a standalone TOC, say Yes.
- In the Set Up Table of Contents dialog, select the paragraph tags that you want to include in the TOC. Click Set. FrameMaker creates a separate TOC file and stores it in the directory where your FrameMaker document is stored.
- Open the new TOC and format it as necessary. You may want to change the font styles/sizes for the TOC paragraphs and set tab stops/leaders.
- Now, open the parent FrameMaker document, place the cursor at the intended insertion point (usually the beginning of the file), and then click File > Import > File. Select the external TOC file and click Import.
- Retain the default settings in the Import Text Flow by Reference dialog box and click Import. FramaMaker imports the TOC by reference into the parent document.
Now, whenever you update the external TOC, simply select the embedded text inset in the parent document and click Update in the Text Inset Properties pod.
Here’s some further suggested reading:
Top ten FrameMaker conversion tips
April 3rd, 2010 Posted in Downloads, Technical Communication Suite, Tips and Tricks, Troubleshooting
Simon Bate has posted his top ten FrameMaker conversion tips over at the Scriptorium blog. Pretty interesting stuff! Do take a look.
As for our FrameMaker tips that he refers to in his post, you can download the PDF from this link.
Enjoy!
RoboHelp: Printed documentation error
The Word VBA macro version registered is incorrect. Please reinstall printed documentation.
If you encounter the above error message while trying to generate printed documentation from a RoboHTML project, change the macro security settings in Microsoft Word.
Follow these steps to change the macro security settings in Word 2007:
- Click the Office button > Word options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings.
- Change Macro Settings to Enable all macros and then click OK.
- Generate printed documentation output from RoboHTML.
Peter Grainge has a useful page on his website summarizing RoboHelp print issues. Do take a look!
You can use the Find/Change feature in FrameMaker to look for many different kinds of objects across a book or in a document.
In particular, Find Unresolved Cross Reference saves me grueling hours of troubleshooting when I’m generating PDFs.
Read more about the search functionality in FrameMaker in this Help article. For tips and best practices on creating PDFs from FrameMaker documents, see this handbook.
When you add watermarks to a PDF document, you want them to be visible unobtrusively. The following settings for the Watermark tool in Acrobat (Document > Watermark > Add) work best for me:
Font: Arial
Size: Varies. For shorter watermarks like the word Draft, 72 pt works well.
Color: Pure red (R: 255, G: 0, B:0)
Rotation: 45°
Opacity: One notch above zero on the slider (12%)
Location: Appear on top of page
If required, you can specify different watermarks for different sets of pages. Click Page range options in the Add Watermark dialog box to do this.
To understand how you can work with watermarks in Acrobat 9, see this Help article.
Consider you have to complete a UI content review for the product you work on. Wouldn’t things be easier if you could use Acrobat text-edit-markup features to highlight the relevant content embedded in images? Of course, you can always add a sticky note in an approximate location, but that isn’t quite as effective!
So how do you enable PDF text edits for embedded text? Here’s how:
- Paste the screenshot in your favorite word-processing or layout tool. For example, FrameMaker.
- Generate a PDF of the page containing the screenshot.
- Open the PDF in Acrobat and select Document > OCR Text Recognition > Recognize Text Using OCR.
- Once the text recognition process is over, you’ll be able to select the embedded text and use the Acrobat text edit tools on it.
This Help article discusses Acrobat text edit features in greater detail. For more information about the OCR features in Acrobat 9, refer to this Help article.
Automating conference registration using LiveCycle Designer
Last year, I had an opportunity to help automate the registration process for the STC India Conference 2009. I created a PDF form using LiveCycle Designer and designed a simple workflow around it.
The presentation at this link discusses this workflow, together with guidelines for both form authors and end users. A snapshot of the workflow is captured in the schematic below.
Some 475 delegates registered using the form without any glitches.
Conference registration is, of course, just one of the examples of the numerous processes that you can automate using LiveCycle Designer. The tool is easy-to-use and provides templates and boilerplate forms that you can customize for your requirements. Through custom JavaScript/FormCalc scripting, you can easily fine-tune any aspect of the PDF form. For example, in the form in question, I used JavaScript to allow “conditional access” to fields. Thus, “field A” accepts input only when “field B” has a certain value, and so on.
If you are looking for the right learning resources to get started with LiveCycle Designer, refer to Adobe LiveCycle Designer ES2 Help (HTML). If you are looking for more information about the product or want to download a free trial copy, visit this page.
If you have a PDF document live on the Web, can you link to a specific page within it instead of the PDF opening at the title page? Absolutely! The page=<pagenum> parameter let’s you do just that.
For example, try http://blogs.adobe.com/samartha/Handbook/pdf_handbook.pdf#page=8. When you click this link, the destination PDF opens directly at page 8.
There are several other parameters that you can specify when you open or link to a PDF document. The following parameters I think are especially useful:
- search=<wordList>; for example, http://blogs.adobe.com/samartha/Handbook/pdf_handbook.pdf#search=”change bar”
- nameddest=<destination>
- comment=<commentID>
For more information, see Parameters for Opening PDF Files (PDF) in the Acrobat SDK documentation set.
Download the free PDF production handbook
Creating a final, print-quality PDF from FrameMaker documents can be an involved, multi-step process. We thought it would be useful to capture all relevant considerations and steps in a single handbook that could be immediately put to use in real-world situations.
The following sections are included in this handbook:
- Relevant scenario
- Prerequisites
- Important considerations
- Equip yourself with relevant details
- Stage 0: Prepare the content
- Stage 1: Clean up the source
- Stage 2: Prepare the book and create PDF
- Stage 3: Test the PDF
- Stage 4: Prepare the PDF for publication
- Stage 5: Optimize the PDF in Acrobat
- Appendix: Best practices for using conditional text
- Appendix: Keeping track of content changes across versions in a collaborative environment
Click this link to download the handbook: pdf_handbook.pdf.
And yes, feel free to share it with your colleagues and friends!