OT: autonumbering in Word

[Diane Gaskill]

Great posts, everyone and thanks for all the fish.  I mean help.  Sorry
John, couldn't help it.

We've set up numbering in our template with SEQ (sequence) fields and solved
some of the problems.  To see how SEQ fields work, just generate a caption
or an xref in word, toggle the field codes, and take a look.  It's also
explained in the help, although not really well.  But Stuart is right. You
can't make a tag that uses SEQ fields, similar to creating a tag using
autonumbering in FM.  Well, at least we could not figure out how.

We also separated the tag families (body, heading, and table) by starting
each one with a tag based on (No Style).  This allows us to make a feature
change to an entire tag family by making the change to only the base tag.
It also helps keep the docs generated by the enjanears intact when our
template is attached.  But as Stuart says, things can get mangled anyway.
They somtimes import info from other Word docs when creating their own.  The
first time I created one of our big docs, I counted 187 tags in the source
docs.  It was SO much fun cleaning them all out.  Fortunately, I have a
shovel. :-)

But no matter what you do, Word still has ways of using it's native
"artificial" intelligence to reformat some things the docs while we sleep.
The little paper clip, whom we have renamed from "Clippit" to "Gremlin" is
at work.

In the long run we plan on doing exactly what Jeremy has suggested.  We are
already using FM to generate our 3600 page docs from multiple (about 200)
imported Word files.  We plan to convert them back to individual Word files
with Mif2Go, so that the enjanears can mangle, spindle, fold, mutilate, and
update them for the next release.  We will import the changes using
unformatted text back into FM and then regenerate the Word files again with
Mif2Go.

Diane



-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces+dgcaller=earthlink.net at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces+dgcaller=earthlink.net at lists.frameusers.com]On
Behalf Of Jeremy H. Griffith
Sent: Friday, May 19, 2006 2:53 PM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Cc: Fred Ridder; srogers at phoenix-geophysics.com
Subject: Re: OT: autonumbering in Word


On Fri, 19 May 2006 17:21:46 -0400, "Fred Ridder" <docudoc at hotmail.com>
wrote:

>>From: Stuart Rogers <srogers at phoenix-geophysics.com>
>
>>Regrettably, Jon, it sounds from McGhie's explanation that even your
>>exhaustively careful preparation of numbering will not immunize you from
>>all risks of numbering disaster. Apparently all you have to do is copy
some
>>numbered (or just bulleted!) content from another document and paste it
>>into yours...

That's pretty broken, all right...

>In my experience with Word, the only truly reliable way to handle
>numbering in Word is to avoid the autonumber feature altogether
>and instead roll your own with the SEQ field code, which you
>wind up using in a way that is fundamentally pretty similar to
>FrameMaker's paragraph numbering except that you have to
>assign a name to each individual digit's counter rather than being
>able to name a complete multi-digit series as in Frame.

Yes, I agree.  That's the method we use in Mif2Go to make
"live" autonumbers in Word docs, based on the Frame counters.
The drawback WRT maintenance in Word is that you have to
copy the SEQ fields from another para of the same type, or
painfully recreate them by hand, for new paras; you can't
include SEQ fields (or bullets) in the para format as such.

This leads to the best workaround of all: use Frame, and
generate the Word version on demand.  ;-)  We have several
customers who do exactly that.  It's even possible to do
it in what used to be an all-Word shop.  After all, if
they get working Word files, why do they care *how* they
were created?  <vbg>

>Unfortunately, since bullets use the same mechanism in Word, you
>still have to live with bizarre behavior in that feature...

Unless you use Frame/Mif2Go as your Word authoring tool...

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/
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