How to Create Sidebar Icons in FrameMaker?

Sidebar icons are cool. They not only look great aesthetically but they also perform a great function by emphasizing the important points in the text and making sure that the reader does not miss them.

I, for example, always use the image of an “exclamation mark inside a triangle” or a “lightning inside a triangle” to the left of any WARNING or CAUTION text. If a hardware user can get an electric shock for missing such an important tip, then I feel it’s my duty as a writer to use strong graphics to alert him/her to the fact.

THE MAIN TRICK is - you need to create a special Paragraph Style (also known as a “Paragraph Tag”) for your sidebar image.

Fire up your Paragraph Designer by selecting Format > Paragraphs > Designer (or entering the very useful Ctrl + M hotkey shortcut) to display the paragraph designer.

Click the Commands button at the bottom to display the popup menu. Select New Format to display the New Format dialog box. Enter a Name for your new style, let’s say, “SideIcon”. Select the “Store in Catalog” check-box because you want this style to be available to you straight from your Paragraph Style list. You do not need to select the other check box “Apply to Selection” since you are creating the style from scratch.

Click Create and the style will be created.

Click the Pagination tab.

Select the “Sidebar Alignment” radio-button. Experiment with the existing alignment options available through the accompanying drop-down list to see which works better to align your icon with the first line of the text. I usually select the default “First baseline.”

Click the Basic Font tab. If you get a Apply Changes prompt, click the “Apply Changes” button.

For default font size, select or enter the SMALLEST possible font size. And you’re done!

Now, place your cursor to the very beginning of your text. Then hit ENTER once and create a new paragraph. (You should always have your Text Symbols on when working in FrameMaker. Select View > Text Symbols, or hit Esc+V+T.)

It is IMPORTANT that you place your cursor to the paragraph symbol you’ve just created on TOP of your existing text. The reason is simple: if you apply your SideIcon style to the existing text, the whole warning or caution text itself will become a sidebar icon! You don’t want that. You want the icon and the first line of the text lined up neatly side-by-side.

After your cursor is in the right spot, click the SideIcon style in the Paragraph Style Catalog (Format >Characters > Catalog).

The new paragraph mark you’ve created will immediately jump to the sidebar, waiting for you to insert your icon.

Select File > Import > File, browse to the image/icon, and click Insert, and you are done.

Congrats!

If the image is not lined up nicely with the first line of the text you can always adjust it by experimenting with the following variables of the SideIcon style inside the Paragraph Designer: font size (in Default Font tab); side head alignment style (in Pagination Tab).

Another thing you can do is go to Special > Anchored Frame dialog box and experiment with the different values in then ANCHORING POSITION drop-down list.

FrameMaker Markers Ease the Pain of Big Tech Book Projects

Those technical writers who have written manuals running hundreds and even thousands of pages know the difficulty of keeping various kinds of markers under control.

But if you are an Adobe FrameMaker user, you are lucky because FM provides you with many ways to mark a document.

Open your document and press Esc+S+M to display that life-saving Marker dialog box. (Or select Special > Marker from the main menu.)

When you click the drop-down menu you’ll be presented with an astonishing variety of ways to mark your document: Author, CloseAnchor, Comment, Conditional Text, ContextString, Cross-Ref, Equation, Glossary, Header/Footer $1, Header/Footer $2, HTML Macro, Hypertext, Index, OpenAnchor, Subject, etc.

And if you select the “Edit…” option you can Add a new custom marker of your own or Change or Delete an existing marker. It’s not going to get any more flexible than that.

In this article I’ll show you how to use the Comment marker.

"Comment" Marker

Comment is basically what it exactly sounds like – if you’d like to drop a note for yourself anywhere in the document, like “do not forget to insert Graph A right after this paragraph” do the following:

1) Place your cursor where you want to insert your comment.

2) Press Esc+S+M to display the Marker dialog box.

3) Select Comment from the drop-down list.

4) Enter your comment in the Marker Text text box.

5) Click New Marker, and you are done!

6) To see a list of all your Comments, select Special > List Of > markers to display the Set Up List of Markers dialog box.

7) Select the Comment marker type from the right list box and click the left arrow to transfer it into the “Include Markers of Type” list box on the left.

8) Check the “Create Hypertext links” check-box (a recommended practice).

9) Then click the Set button and you’ll have all your Comment type of markers listed in a separate window for you.

To go to any specific Comment marker, place your cursor on the page number of the listed comment and press Ctrl and Alt buttons (on a PC) simultaneously. Your cursor will transform into a pointing finger. Click and you’ll automatically be taken to that specific comment even if it is on page 10,000. To delete the comment, hit the Delete button immediately after you hyperlink to the comment from your Comments List.

This is how you can make all kinds of notes to yourself as you are working on a long document, without worrying about forgetting anything. Before finishing the document, you can generate a list of all such comments and take care of them one by one.

Good luck!

How to Hide FrameMaker Page Number Cross-References by Conditional Text

If you have a document that will be printed hardcopy (or distributed as PDF) as well as used as a help file, the hyperlinked page number cross-references usually create a problem since page numbers do not make sense in a help file and should not be there.

So what are you going to do? Create two different versions of the same document, one with and the other without page number references? Of course not.

With FrameMaker, you can have your cake and eat it too by creating a single source document with conditional text.

When you hide the conditional text (for the help file), the page number references would be hidden too. And when you turn them on (for generating a PDF copy or regular printed hardcopy), you'll have your page references back on displaying again.

The trick is to split your hyperlinked cross-references into two parts and assign different cross-reference formats to them.

For example, consider the cross-reference "See Chapter 15, Troubleshooting on page 235."

You want this reference to show as is in the hardcopy print edition since the readers can actually flip to that page (or click to that page if it is saved as PDF).

But in a help file, you want the same reference show up only as "See Chapter 15, Troubleshooting."

Here is how you do it:

1) You select "See Chapter 15, Troubleshooting" and press Esc+S+C (or select Special > Cross Reference from the main menu) to display your cross-reference designer.

2) Assign a "Heading only" cross-reference style to the selected text, a style that does not include any page number.

3) Click the Replace button to assign the style to the selected text.

4) Then do the same with the text " on page 235" – including the space just before "o". In your cross-reference designer, assign a "Page only" style to the page number text.

5) While the page number text is still selected, display your conditional text dialog box by selecting Special > Conditional Text from your main menu. Make sure the "Conditional" radio-button is selected because you will make this text conditional.

6) Either select one of the "Not In" tags and click the left arrow to transfer it into the "In" box… or, click the Edit Condition Tag button and create your own tag, named something like "HidePageNum". Then make sure you again select this new tag and transfer it into the "In" box.

7) To toggle the page number text on and off, click the Show/Hide button. In the "Show/Hide Conditional text" dialog box, select your tag and move it into the "Show" box to show it and "Hide" box to hide it. When you press the Set button, the FrameMaker will either show or hide your conditional text, depending on your choice.

8) Repeat the same for all the text in your document that you'd like to hide first before compiling a help file.

If you use the same conditional text tag for all the text that you want to hide, at compilation time all you need to do is hide a single tag and FrameMaker will automatically hide all the text tagged with that same label as a conditional text. It's as simple as that.

This is a very convenient way to turn on and off hundreds and thousands of different text strings in a long document by just a single command. It is worth practicing it until you get it right because it will save you untold hours of work in the future when you are struggling against the deadline to compile a neat looking help file from your main document.

Enjoy and good luck!

Worst Writer in the World !

I heard this on NPR today as I was driving to work...

Garrison Spik earned the dubious distinction of writing the Worst Opening Sentence in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:

"Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city their passion was open 24-7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped 'Forged by DeLaney Brothers, Piscataway, New Jersey."

LOL!!!!  Fantastic! 

This Clever Catalog Copy Rolls...

I love Crate&Barrel catalogs. I think they are among the best written consumer product catalogs, anywhere.

Here is an example:

"Kik-Step Stools - Kick it and it rolls. Step on it and it locks. Clever spring-mounted retractable casters take this handy steel stool wherever you need it..."

ACTION verbs in the IMPERATIVE mode -- kick it, step on it... it tells you exactly what you should be doing. Nothing is left to chance here.

It addresses YOU - "wherever you need it..."

You hear the music? "Kick it and it rolls. Step on it and it locks."

Just when you're wondering if this thing that OBEYS your commands is actually ALIVE, the writer anticipates your subliminal question -- "CLEVER spring-mounted retractable casters..."

Ladies and gentlemen: this thing is not a dumb stool. It's a CLEVER stool. It will obey you and make you HAPPY. It's an obedient puppy in the shape of a stool.

See how deep good copy penetrates? If the writer who wrote this copy is giving a workshop, take it.

Three Frame Maker Tips

Renaming the FrameMaker Books

Think twice before changing the name of a FrameMaker book file especially if the book includes TOC, index, List of Figures (LOF) and List of Tables (LOT) files.

Because when you try to compile a new PDF book file, FrameMaker will try to locate the newly-named versions of the TOC, IX, LOT, and LOF files.

When it can’t find them, it will refuse to create a PDF book. You will have to re-create those TOC, IX, LOT and LOF files to compile the PDF file of the newly-named book.

Images disappear in PDF?

You save your FM document as PDF but the images in anchored frames disappear. All you get is blank frames.

Solution?

Select File > Preferences > General and check the Save FrameImage with Imported Graphics check-box.

Re-generate the PDF and all your images should be there.

Installing new or missing fonts for FM

1) Save (or extract) the fonts to a folder on your system.

2) Go to your Windows Control Panel > Fonts screen.

3) From the menu, select File > Install New Font… to display the Add Fonts dialog box.

4) Find the folder in which you have saved the desired font. Select it and make sure it appears in the List of Fonts list box. Make sure the Copy fonts to Fonts folder check-box is checked.

5) Click OK.

6) When you open your FM document, you should see the new font listed when you select Format > Font from the main menu.

(The new font should be accessible from other Windows applications like Photoshop as well.)

Olympics Observations...

1) Matt Furey is such an excellent writer and opportunity marketer. Whenever there's a momentous event, you can count on it, Matt will fire off a personal and well-written letter on the occasion and will not of course forget to plug in his products as well.

This afternoon I found in my mail box his take on Michael Phelp's second gold medal and the phenomenal 4x100 race with the French. Online marketers: take notice and emulate.

2) A failure in information design: isn't it annoying that NBC will not broadcast maximum scores in any given competition?

For example, NBC anchors will repeatedly tell us that an American athlete just scored 15.87 and that it's an "excellent score." But HOW excellent is that? I have no idea since I do not know what the PERFECT score is.

If perfect score is 16, then I can make that judgment for myself too and agree that it's an "excellent" score indeed. But what if the perfect score is 20, 50, or 100?

It's baffling that NBC continues not to provide the audience what the perfect score is in a competition. If I were them, I'd not only broadcast the perfect score but also include a tiny pie-chart right next to the individual score, visually displaying how close the individual competitor got to achieving that perfect score. That's a piece of must-have information graphics that is sorely missing from NBC broadcasts.

3) Image sacrificed to cuteness. Have you seen the GE commercial that shows an ancient Greek disc thrower bringing down the Parthenon when the wind changes its course? I thought that was a DISASTER of a commercial for GE's Wind Power projects because, although humorous, it plants in the mind of the audience the IMAGE that wind can be a DANGEROUS element leading to DESTRUCTION of PRICELESS TREASURES.

Wow! Whoever thought of that commercial really did an excellent job of planting the seeds of doubt in the minds of those who perhaps already had a question or two about wind power to start with. That was a textbook case of sacrificing function for form.

4) An odd comment in the year 2008. I was taken aback by a casual comment made by one of the NBC commentators, following the fall of an American gymnast during her performance (I am paraphrasing): "...that was like tearing her wedding dress in the aisle..."

I found it very peculiar that the male commentator chose such an image to describe the female gymnast's plight.

Would he describe the foul up as "...like tearing his tuxedo's pants in the aisle..." if the athlete in question were male?