How do Reference Pages work? (Advanced)

[Zoe Lawson]

Greetings,

I've been using Frame for about 6 years now. My tech writing certificate course talked us through some basics, so I can make my own templates, no problem. I was a lone writer for almost 5 years, and I taught myself a lot of stuff about making templates. I even tinkered with Framescript. I'm not a guru (especially compared to many of the aces on this list), but I'm not a novice either. (With unstructured Frame, anyway. I haven't touched structured.)

Today I was helping someone with a Frame Template because the TOC wasn't generating properly. Even though it was all configured correctly on the TOC Reference page, the tabs weren't coming through when you regenerated the TOC.

Turned out there were two TOC pages, TOC and TOC1. I made the normal TOC formatting changes to TOC1, and it seemed to generate fine.

So, I've gotten it to work...but why?

1. How did the second TOC reference page get in there? This template uses a LOT of reference pages. E.g. a lot of internal information (that you need to reference) is stored in the reference pages, such as how to insert graphics, document numbers, etc. Do all those reference pages 'confuse' things?

2. Why was Frame looking at the 2nd TOC reference page? Is there some mystical setting you can only see in the MIF file that 
tells Frame which TOC reference page to use? Or does frame just read through the 'flow' of the reference pages and takes whatever the last one is? How does Frame know to look at TOC or TOC1 for the formatting of the TOC page? Does it go by the name of the page? i.e. anything with TOC in it?

I hope some of you gurus out there can explain it to me. I like knowing why something works, so I can better understand how to use it.

Thanks!

Zoë



 
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