Creating Popup menus in FrameMaker

[Daniel Emory]

--- "Carol J. Elkins" <celkins at awrittenword.com>
wrote:
> Good post, Dan. However, I'm trying to visualize
your
> statement, "...clicking on this button produced a 
> menu of links to major subject areas..." The 
> button part I understand, the menu of links I'm
> struggling with. A popup menu? If so, could you tell
> me how you achieve the menu of links functionality?
========================
You asked how a popup menu is created in FrameMaker.
Here’s the procedure: (steps 1 and 2 are used only if
a button in a background text frame on a master page
is used to open the menu. If, instead, you want to
open the menu from highlighted anchor text within a
body page, proceed directly to step 3).

1. On a reference page, draw a text frame. Inside that
text frame draw a button, and use the drawing tool’s
text button to insert, inside the button, a
descriptive name for the button.

2. Inside the empty paragraph at the top of the text
frame (not inside the button) insert a hypertext
marker of the form:
            popup flowname
where flowname is the name of a text flow of a text
frame you are going to draw on a reference page.

3. Alternatively, you can skip steps 1 and 2, and
instead insert the "popup flowname" hypertext marker
into highlighted text (i.e., the hypertext anchor)
within an ordinary body page. NOTE: If you are using
structured FrameMaker, it might be advisable to
specify the "popup flowname" marker in your structure
rules, and define it as an element of type marker.
 
4. On a reference page (I usually create a special
reference page named "Popups"), draw a text frame and
assign that text frame the same flowname you specified
in step 2 or 3.

5. In the first paragraph inside the text frame
created in step 4, enter, on the top line, the title
of the popup menu (it’ll only appear in the popup menu
on Unix platforms). In the second and succeeding
paragraphs within the menu, type the names of the
items you want to appear on the menu.

6. Immediately following the last letter of each menu
item (other than the title) added in step 5, insert
the appropriate hypertext marker type (most commonly
jump to named destination, but other types may also be
used). The Jump to Named Destination marker has the
form:
                         gotolink destination_name
                         where destination_name is the
unique name of a newlink hypertext marker
                         which you insert in the text
of the applicable content.
However, the hypertext link can also be to a popup
sub-menu, in which case the menu item that refers to
the submenu would be created in step 4 thru 6.
However, a sub-menu cannot reference another popup
menu.

7. If you used the button approach described in steps
1 and 2, copy the text frame containing the button you
created, and paste it as a background text frame on a
master page.

8. Once all that is accomplished, clicking on the
button (or the highlighted text) will open the popup
menu, and the user can then select the desired subject
node from the menu.