Containers and Insets-Building the Manual

[Jing Torralba]

I use Richard's technique in creating insets in multiple flows within the same source document. The insets populate cells of many similar tables where one table uses 100% of the insets and the rest, only a subset of all insets in different combinations. The tables describe the options for adding an administrator, and there are three types of administrators with unique and common options. 

Once I nailed down the process, inset management worked like a charm. 

Judy, I want to add this, in case you are producing PDFs and there are cross-references from your inset files to external files, meaning, to the container file itself or to other chapters in the book. These xrefs will be broken in the PDF. For this you can use Rick Quatro's script to unlock the insets, generate the PDF, then lock them again. This preserves the links. 



HTH too! 

Jing 

,.-*+*-.,.-*+*-.,.-*+*-.,.-*+*-.,.-*+*-.,.-*+*-.,.-*+*-.,.-*+*-.,! 


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Richard Combs" <richard.combs at Polycom.com> 
To: "Judy" <judy at hypack.com>, framers at lists.frameusers.com 
Sent: Thursday, May 21, 2009 1:15:48 PM GMT -08:00 US/Canada Pacific 
Subject: RE: Containers and Insets-Building the Manual 

Judy wrote: 
  
> I read several posts concerning text insets in container documents and 
> that sounded like the perfect solution.  After a few tests on a very 
> small scale, I moved forward to breaking down  and reassembling the 
> first 3 chapters of our user manual. 
> Ch.1:  63 pgs,    61 insets 
> Ch.2: 224 pgs, 168 insets 
> Ch 3:   83 pgs,   71 insets 
> 
> Each chapter (individually) worked fine, so with that much done, I 
> decided to build a test book and work out the issues around 
> cross-references and hypertext before I continued on to the remaining 
6 
> chapters. 
> 
> My problem is that, with all of the fm files and books open at once, 
my 
> computer slowed *way* down!  I built a book with the 3 container 
> documents and added a TOC, but had trouble scrolling through the TOC. 
> Nothing "crashed", but it was so slow it's clear that I'm headed for 
> trouble. 

That seems like a lot of text insets, but without knowing how/where 
you're going to reuse them, I can't say whether you've gone too far 
(there's not much point in all this modularization unless the insets are 
pieces that will be reused a lot, but in different combinations and 
configurations). 

Is each text inset an FM file? It doesn't have to be. A text inset needs 
to be a complete flow, but a single FM file can contain many separate 
flows (each with its own flow name). So you can put just about any 
number of text insets in one file. You can even use this as an 
organizing method, putting all text insets of a certain category, 
subject, purpose, etc., together in an appropriately-named file. 
Consolidating all those text insets into a handful of files may solve 
your problem. 

The process isn't difficult: 

1) On the last page of one of the existing text inset source documents, 
select Special > Add Disconnected Pages. Set Number of Pages to Add to 
the number of text insets you want to store in this file and click Add. 
When FM tries to discourage you from proceeding, tell it you're sure. 

2) On each added, empty page, paste one of the text insets you want to 
store in this file. Don't worry if some of them are more than a page -- 
FM will create new pages as needed for each flow (each disconnected page 
you added is a separate flow; each has its own end-of-flow symbol). 

3) Give each flow a unique, meaningful name: 

-- Select a text frame in the flow and select Graphics > Object 
Properties. 
-- In the Customize Text Frame dialog, enter the name in the Flow Tag 
field and click Set. 
-- In the Rename Flow dialog, select Rename Current Flow Only and click 
Rename. 

When you want to import one of the text insets, select the file and 
then, in the Import Text Flow by Reference, select the flow by name. 

HTH! 
Richard 


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






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