Cross-reference oddity in FM 9

[Shlomo Perets]

Rene,

You wrote:

>I am having some trouble getting character formatting to read through
>in a cross-reference. The challenge is that the character formatting
>is part of the trademarked product name, so we do need the single
>letter i at the end of the product name to always appear in italics. I
>have it working fine in the variable for the product name, but the one
>thing I can't seem to figure out is why it only shows default
>paragraph font for the x-ref, unless I include a char format tag in
>the x-ref definition...which then applies the char tag to the whole
>building block...but the single italic i is just one character within
>the building block.
>
>Is there something that I am missing, or is this impossible to do in
>the way I'm attempting? I have attached a sample file stripped of all
>but the relevant formats involved with this issue, if someone could
>please take a look and tell me what I'm doing wrong.


Nothing is wrong in how you do this.

However, in the context of cross-references, <$paratext> ignores all 
character formatting present in the extracted paragraph text, except 
superscript, subscript and font family properties - which are retained only 
if implemented through a character tag.

To preserve a property such as italic (or bold), you need to have a 
different font name for the required variation (even though visually it is 
the identical font); alternatively, use a different font. For example, I 
have "Univers-Condensed Oblique" in my font list; text tagged with a 
character format using this font preserves its italic property when it is 
cross-referenced. Some font families are installed this way by default.

If you don't have such a similar font in your current font list, you can 
instruct FrameMaker to treat the Italic variation of Arial Narrow as a 
distinct font name through the maker.ini file (but then Italic will not be 
displayed as an available angle for Arial Narrow in the Character or 
Paragraph Designer, you will have to choose a different font -- Arial 
Narrow Italic -- to get the Italic).


Shlomo Perets

MicroType, http://www.microtype.com
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