Carrying the Title of a Book forward [was Variables]

[Bernard Aschwanden]

The cross book issue can become a problem. What you may want to try is to have all your files in a folder and create books 'above' that folder. Once done you can pick and choose what files go into a book. Then you still need to have a cover.fm file and you need to change (or conditionalize) the title on an 'as needed' basis. However, you could potentially have something like this:

\main_folder\ 
Europe.book 
Asia.book 
Africa.book 
America.book 
Oceania.book 
OPEC.book 
EU.book 
APEC.book 
AxisOfEvil.book 
AxisOfJustAsEvil.book* 
Cover.fm 

\fm_files\ 
Abkhazia.fm 
Afghanistan.fm 
Akrotiri.fm 
Åland.fm 
Albania.fm 
Algeria.fm 
... 
... 
... 
Yemen.fm 
Zambia.fm 
Zimbabwe.fm 


Now you can reference any mix/match of the files into a book and build all you need. They all reference the same cover.fm file and then you can mix/match as you see fit as often as you want. The drawback is the need to update cover.fm once per book you build.

You could even use a plain text file named covername.txt and inset it into the footer so that non frame users could update the name of a book for automated processes (webworks etc).

It's work to manage the cover.fm file, but may be considered useful to some on the list.

You could even have subfolders using this system, but it becomes a bit bulky. I also usually add a master.book that has ALL the files so that I can do major level modifications (such as importing). Sometimes you can even create 'disposable' books using this method if you need a quick one of a kind publication.

Of course, none of this is legally binding information or even useful and any links to this topic may be freely created as long as no one ever considers this to be 'correct' and agrees to pay me richly if this gets you a huge (or even a small) raise. Heck, if you even get a smile out of this or a good idea feel free to send cash or buy me food/drink at the conferences you may find me at :)

Bernard

PS. http://www.satirewire.com/news/jan02/axis.shtml for the axis of just as evil... (link used without permission but with apologies to google, yahoo, satirewire and any other entity that may ever have been involved in the creation of this site, links to the site, similar sites and even in the use of binary values 1 and 0)



-----Original Message-----
From: John Posada [mailto:jposada01 at yahoo.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 10:58 AM
To: bernard at publishingsmarter.com; framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Carrying the Title of a Book forward [was Variables]

> What I often do is build the title in a file, such as "cover.fm" and 
> then build a folder structure along the lines of the following 
> example:
> page I place an xref to the BookName paragraph that I put into the 
> cover. Then all I ever need to do is update

Bernard...I think I did almost exactly what you describe and it worked until I started combining files in different books.

For instance...every book I create has, after the frontmatter files, a chapter called Overview. This chapter givea a highlevel description of the module I'm describing and may be anywhere from one page to five or six pages.

I also have a book that combines all the overview sections into one book, which is an overview of the application (a portal) that I'm documenting. The book also has its own frontmatter.

I want all of the overview sections, when they appear in the Overview book, to have overview in the header, and when they appear in the module books, to have the module title in the header. It did not seem to work out that way.

Maybe it was a particular way I implemented the functionality. Would your method accomodate it?

John Posada
Senior Technical Writer

"So long and thanks for all the fish."