If you face problems with FrameMaker 7/8 suddenly crashing when you try to generate PDF files, you’re probably missing a hotfix that Microsoft has released for FrameMaker. This hotfix solves some other issues as well.
Sometimes, when you insert a cross-reference to a paragraph, the first word in the paragraph is conditional. The cross-reference marker that FrameMaker inserts then also becomes conditional and takes the condition tag settings of the first word. This marker is hidden when you hide the conditions of the first word. As a result, if the condition-tag settings of the cross-reference and of the cross-reference marker differ, you end up with a mysterious unresolved cross-reference!
Consider the screenshot below. Here, the first word in the cross-referenced paragraph is conditional. However, since all conditions are currently displayed, the Cross-References pod in FrameMaker 9 shows the corresponding cross-reference as resolved.
Now, consider the illustration below. Once the condition for the first word of the cross-referenced paragraph is hidden, the Cross-References pod indicates that the corresponding cross-reference is broken.
To avoid this situation, select just the cross-reference marker at the beginning of the source paragraph, and make it unconditional. This way, the marker will always be visible. The cross-reference will now be resolved regardless of the conditions visible.
See this Help article to understand how you can apply or remove conditional tags to text. For greater insight into issues that you may face while working with conditional text, see this overview article, especially the Planning conditional documents section.
The Adobe booth at the STC India Conference had free brochures sharing our top ten tips for FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and Acrobat. You’ve already read the FrameMaker tips in some recent blog posts.
1. Track changes as you go
Track the changes in text as you edit your FrameMaker documents.
In FrameMaker, select Special > Track Text Edits and use the options under this menu to quickly enable, preview, accept, or reject changes. See this feature in action here.
Use the PDF Setup dialog box to optimize the size of the generated PDFs, control SWF fi le and 3D object embedding, and create tagged PDFs to enable importing PDF comments. See this link for more information.
If you want to preserve change bars in the source but hide them in an interim PDF, set their color to white in the Change Bar Properties dialog box. Turn them back to black when you edit the source.
In FrameMaker, select Format > Document > Change Bars. See this earlier blog post for more information.
Directly import comments from the PDF document that you set up for shared review. The FrameMaker content gets updated with the edits and comments. Choose the comments that you want to incorporate and discard the rest!
In FrameMaker, select File > Import > PDF Comments.
See this feature in action here. For the earlier blog post about this feature, see this page.
5. Manage Content Changes Across Document Versions
See this article in FrameMaker online Help for more information.
For more information, see this Help article.
Launch a shared review with just a click.
Consider this: You are searching for a term in your FrameMaker document and FM says it can’t find the term! You are sure that the term is there — it is the name of the product that you are documenting. You are worried.
Stop for a moment and think:
Even if you search for the text with all the above considerations taken into account, it is a good practice to create a PDF with the required Show/Hide settings, and then search in it for the text that you want to find.
Some more info on managing change bars efficiently!
If you want to preserve change bars in interim PDFs, you can set their color to white in the Change Bar Properties dialog box (Format > Document > Change Bars in FrameMaker 9), so that they are not visible in the PDFs. See this article for more information about this dialog box.
Later, if required, you can set the change bar color again to a visible color.
Of course, you may want to clear the change bars once and for all before you generate the final PDF build. See the earlier blog post.
If you choose to make the change bars white, ensure that you don’t have a black background for the page numbers in the header/footer. Otherwise, white change bars will be visible alongside changed page numbers in the PDF.
You must remove the change bars in a book before generating the final PDF for publication. Note that change bars appear again if you flatten the text insets in the book after clearing all change bars. For more information about using change bars in FrameMaker efficiently, see http://bit.ly/ju6xw.
To clear the change bars in a book, follow these steps:
To flatten the text insets in the book before setting out to clear change bars, follow these steps:
For information about searching text insets and other items in FrameMaker 9, see http://bit.ly/NpiOn. For information on how to manage your text insets best with FrameMaker 9, see http://bit.ly/XUTll.
Important: Flattening text insets involves book-level changes that are difficult to reverse. It is recommended that you flatten text insets only in a local copy of your content and not in the central copy administered through a version-control system.