Find/replace coding to formatting

[Cathy Giddens]

Patternstream from Finite Matters Ltd would handle this very easily, I do similar projects with data in Excel, all coded for Paragraphs, and with <b>  </b> etc for Character Formatting. My heavily formatted and tabled book of 750 pages takes 17 minutes to run, including TOC's and Index.   The new much smaller project, currently around 60 pages, takes around 20 seconds to generate in Framemaker. The Excel file can be open, as long as changes have been saved, for edits 'on the fly'.   All the indexing and cross-referencing info is held in the Excel file, and instructions create Index and Xref markers in the text as the project runs.  

Patternstream's not cheap, but if you can fit it into your budget, or the client's.....  I wouldn't be without it for my projects. There's a fairly steep learning curve, but it was fun to learn, I learnt from the manual and the examples provided, they do run training courses though. 


Regards
Cathy Giddens, FNZIQS, Reg QS  |  Managing Editor

Rawlinsons Media Limited
Publisher of Rawlinsons New Zealand Construction Handbook
Level 4, 135 Broadway, Newmarket, PO Box 9804, Newmarket, Auckland 1149
NEW ZEALAND

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Message: 2
Date: Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:09:37 -0500
From: "Kenneth C. Benson" <kbenson at pegtype.com>
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Find/replace coding to formatting
Message-ID: <4F2FED31.4060108 at pegtype.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed

Twice a year I put together an approximately 1500-page document from an Excel spreadsheet. I code the information in Excel so that I can Find/Replace codes to paragraph tags, and then I save to tab-delimited text, clean it up in NoteTab, and bring the txt file into Frame. I've tried using Indesign, but Frame is faster (still slow with 1500 pages, but much faster than Indesign). I search for my codes and replace them with paragraph tags. I can usually get the tagging part done in about 15 minutes.

What's giving me agita is the character-level formatting (new this year). It's easy enough for me to surround the characters I want formatted with codes (like <italicon>italic words here<italicoff>), but I haven't found a way in Frame to easily Find/Replace this to a character format. This year I brought the text into Indesign, found and tagged my italics with a GREP search, and then copied and pasted RTF into Frame. This sort of worked. Indesign was really, really slow, and it left some phantom characters right before returns that made searching for returns in Frame impossible, but it was better than manually swiping and applying a format 6000 times (4 times per page).

There must be a better way. I'm using Frame 9. Did Adobe improve Frame's Find/Replace with Frame 10 (like, maybe, including GREP)? Is there a simple way to include markup in the text file? I don't need to bother marking everything up. The paragraph tags are easy enough to Find/Replace. ISTR something called MML that I played around with about
15 years ago, but I don't see it as a choice for Save As or for Import. 
I tried Saving to MIF, but it looks very complicated. Can I code just the italics in MIF and do the rest of the formatting in Frame? Or is there a better way?

--
Kenneth Benson
Pegasus Type
(518) 697-0700
(866) 498-9692 (fax)
www.pegtype.com



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