Disappearing anchored frames: strange FrameMaker bug

[Fred Ridder]

Steve Rickaby wrote:

> The template for this book was inherited from an Indian company, and had some bad stuff in it (such as requiring a triple-click to select a word rather than a double-click (!?&*?!), of which perhaps not all has been cleaned out. The main flow has a 30-point left/right side-head margin, although I have no idea why: it's not used for anything. We are stuck with this design as several books have already been published using it.
> 
> Anyway, in the test file I can make a specific figure 'disappear' by floating it. By experimentation, it seems that this problem only occurs if the anchored frame is wide enough to move into the side-head margin. This effect is reproducible:
> 
> . Set frame width to be inside side-head space
> 
> . Float it - figure behaves as expected
> 
> . Enlarge frame so that it just expands into side-head space
> 
> . Anchored frame vanishes


This is beginning to make sense. If the frames are anchored in a paragraph that cannot extend across the sidehead area, and the frame is a little too wide to fit within that margin, when you set the frame to float it will float away until it finds a page that has a text frame that the graphic frame can fit within. (This would seem to be one of the basuc use cases that floating frames would be designed to accommodate.)  But when it doesn't find such a page, it floats away into the ether. 

As a test, I'd try manually widening the text frame on the page where you want the graphic to float to. My guess is that the float will work in this case. Then try restoring that page to normal and widening a page farther on in the file; my guess is that the graphic will float to the new widened locatin.

-Fred Ridder