Beware the Inadvertent Global Search and Replace

[Penelope Perkins]

I posted this yesterday and copied to David. I know he received it, but it doesn't seem to have made it to the list, so I'm resending. 


David,

We first had this problem in FM 7.2 when Adobe removed the "are you sure?" prompt that used to appear when you selected Change All. After one of our writers had to fix an inadvertant find & replace in a 1500 page manual, I used Resource Hacker to remove the shortcut (in FM7 and 8, it's the letter A) from the Change All button. Without the shortcut, you have to click the Change All button or tab to it and press Enter, which has eliminated the problem for us. Just Google "resource hacker" to find a download site. The util is really easy to use, but we're still on FM8 so I can't say whether you can use it on FM9 dialogues.

Regards,

Penelope

=========================================
Penelope Perkins, Senior Technical Writer
Synergex
Sacramento, California
pperkins at synergex.com


-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of David Dorbin
Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 12:03 PM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Beware the Inadvertent Global Search and Replace

Argh.

Before I had Frame 9, I had Frame 7, and I used to would Find things thusly:

1. Press Ctrl-f
2. Start typing the text to find.
3. Press Enter.

Now in Frame 9, when I press ctrl-f, the Find/Change pod displays, but the
cursor is rarely waiting there in the text box. In fact, the "focus" seems
to be unpredictable.

This has bitten me a few times already. I hit ctrl-f and start typing, and
Frame decides that I meant to do a global search and replace. It might be
that I'm typing "c" and that activates the Change button. Lucky for me, I've
usually got the Document rather than the Book radio button selected, so it
only makes the change in the current chapter. And I can do a quick Undo
Replace.

Lucky until today, that is. This time the Book radio button was lit up, and
Frame replaced x with y 27 times across all chapter files. And it opens each
one, makes the changes, and closes it, so there is no Undo. I had to open up
each of 18 chapter files, search for the replace text, evaluate each
occurrence with my actual mind to see if was one of the inadvertent
replacements, and fix it back.

Anyone else experienced this? Any advice, other than to slow down and to
rely less on keyboard shortcuts?

Dave D.