RE: Any way to hide unconditional text?

Thu Aug 4 08:02:17 PDT 2011

Hello Gay

Not creative, just a grateful reader of other people's suggestions over the years ;^)

  I have in fact used the method described in years past, with entirely satisfactory results.

Others may chime in with better suggestions or refinements, but what you are doing sounds fine. On a technical point, FrameMaker does not mind where you place your text frame, since it is not "in" the larger flow A anyway. It *overlies* your flow A when you view your document, but that's just a visual effect caused by the master page design for flow A. If you want, you could modify your flow A master page(s) to accommodate space for your Metadata flow. It's entirely up to you. When you import the contents of a flow into another document as an inset, you can choose to disregard the layout of the imported flow in favour of the layout of the "container" document (I think that's correct; it's a long time since I used insets).

Roger

Roger Shuttleworth
Technical Documentation
AV-BASE Systems Inc.
1000 Air Ontario Drive, Suite 200
London, Ontario
N5V 3S4
Tel. 519 691-0919 ext. 330
  _____  

From: Gay Alson [mailto:GALSON at epicor.com]
To: Roger Shuttleworth [mailto:rshuttleworth at avbasesystems.com]
Cc: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Sent: Thu, 04 Aug 2011 09:59:16 -0400
Subject: RE: Any way to hide unconditional text?

Hi Roger –

What an interesting suggestion.  I had never worked with text flows before, but after your e-mail, I created a text flow tag called Metadata containing the four fields I mentioned earlier and I imported only that flow into the “master” file that was designed to display only the metadata info from each text inset file.

You’re right – it works!

You mentioned putting each text inset file in a different flow, up to 256. But as we may end up with several hundred text inset files over time, it occurred to me to try it the other way ‘round: That is, to see if the main contents of each text inset file could remain in Flow Tag A, with only the four-line metadata in a separate flow. (Which means dealing only with two text flows instead of many.) That’s what I tried and it does work, at least in my first experiments. Can you think of any reason NOT to continue with that? I also wasn’t sure about where to place the new text frame containing the Metadata Flow Tag, so I inserted it in the upper left of my regular Flow A.  I had my doubts whether FM would permit a text flow within the frame of the larger Flow A but it seems to be okay.

Thank you so much for your creative approach to this – do my changes make sense or might I have paved the way for future problems due to my lack of familiarity with this new feature?

Thanks again,

~~Gay

From: Roger Shuttleworth [mailto:rshuttleworth at avbasesystems.com] 
Sent: Thursday, August 04, 2011 8:51 AM
To: Gay Alson
Cc: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Any way to hide unconditional text?

Hello Gay

One idea is to use multiple flows for your text insets. A FM document can have up to (I think) 256 different flows, each having a unique name. You could have each text inset in a different flow, but put your metadata in the main flow (A). Then when you import the text inset, you select the flow that you want to import (try it and see!). If you name your flows appropriately, it should be clear which flow you want to import.

Depending on the size of your insets, you may want to use either one file or split them across several files in order to limit file size.

That's one idea that comes to mind...

Hope this helps.

Roger

Roger Shuttleworth
Technical Documentation
AV-BASE Systems Inc.
1000 Air Ontario Drive, Suite 200
London, Ontario
N5V 3S4
Tel. 519 691-0919 ext. 330

  _____  

From: Gay Alson [mailto:GALSON at epicor.com]
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Sent: Tue, 02 Aug 2011 13:08:22 -0400
Subject: Any way to hide unconditional text?

Hello again, Framers,

(FrameMaker 9.0p255, Windows 7 64-bit.)

Does the following make sense?

Let’s say we have 100 text inset files for use in various chapters of various books. Each TI file starts with this:

     <Filename - Long> system variable
     <Creation Date - Short> system variable
     <Description> Not a variable; a text description of the text inset file.
     <Product> Not a variable; an indication whether the text inset is app-specific or global. 

This information is conditionalized with the Metadata tag (which is used only here and nowhere else in any of the TI files). 

For reporting and versioning purposes, I want to copy and paste each text inset file into a file called “TextInsets.fm”. In this file, I want to show ONLY text bearing the Metadata tag. However, although I can hide all of the other condition tags, I can’t hide unconditional text. (And I don’t want to have to tag unconditional text with a condition called Unconditional, just to be able to hide it...!)

Am I overlooking something obvious, or a better way to accomplish this?

Thanks for any suggestions,

~~Gay

_________________________________________

Gay Alson
Senior Technical Writer
Epicor Retail
www.epicor.com
Tel.: (514) 428-2116
Fax: (514) 426-0824
E-mail: galson at epicor.com

Epicor (Incorporating NSB and CRS)
2800 Trans Canada Highway, Pointe Claire QC H9R 1T1

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  Le présent courriel est envoyé à l’intention exclusive de son ou de ses destinataires. Si vous avez reçu ce courriel par erreur, veuillez en aviser immédiatement l’expéditeur et supprimer ce message. Si vous n’êtes pas le destinataire visé, nous vous informons que toute utilisation, divulgation ou distribution de cette communication est strictement interdite sans la permission préalable de l’auteur. Des précautions ont été prises afin de réduire au maximum le risque de transmission de virus informatique, mais nous tenons à vous conseiller de procéder à vos propres vérifications antivirus de toute pièce jointe à ce message. Aucune responsabilité ne sera assumée à la suite de toute perte ou de tout dommage causés par des virus.        
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