Broken xrefs

[Kelly McDaniel]

Right. Just to cut to the chase...I have about 6 years of FrameMaker
experience handling 64 books of 8kplus pages. What happened today has me
stumped.

Once again: I opened all books in FrameMaker and did my renaming in FM
to preserve all the (very literally, thousands of) links that were
established by many, many offsite contract authors who preceded me.
(These books have far too many cross-refs to reflect good style and
conscientiousness toward usability...but, I digress.

I knew there'd be trouble if I broke links because the myriad authors
apparently followed their own respective conventions. Now, FM has not
preserved the links, Humpty has fallen off the wall, and I think IXGen
is the only fix.

I do appreciate the suggestion of a hand-code fix in plain text, but
there are far too many for a one-man shop...regards, Kelly.

-----Original Message-----
From: Combs, Richard [mailto:richard.combs at Polycom.com] 
Sent: Friday, September 14, 2007 2:48 PM
To: Fred Ridder; Kelly McDaniel; framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: RE: Broken xrefs

Fred Ridder wrote:

> FrameMaker only knows to update generated files that have the 
> same base filename as the book plus the relevant generated 
> file suffix (e.g.
> ...TOC, ...LOF, ...IX). If the names of the existing 
> generated files don't follow the pattern, FrameMaker will 
> generate brand-new, unformatted generated files rather than 
> updating the existing ones.

Fred's right about changing file names within FM so that xrefs are
updated -- not to mention the book file itself. But he's wrong about
generated files. At least since FM6, FM hasn't relied on the file names
to identify generated files. Assuming you change your TOC file's name
within the book window as Fred advised, FM will still know it's your TOC
file and will happily update it.

But, if you rename your TOC file outside of FM, then FM can't find it,
and will generate a new one that has the name listed in the book window
(which will be either the naming pattern Fred specified or whatever name
you previously gave it in the book window).

Getting back to fixing your broken links, you could save the files as
MIF, open them as text, and use find/replace operations to update the
file names.

HTH!
Richard


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Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
------
rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
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