FM12 has char format in xref been fixed?

[Steve Rickaby]

At 11:56 -0700 4/2/14, Carol J. Elkins wrote:

>Best practice for setting up character formats is to set everything As Is except the feature that you want the character tag to control. That would include setting the Font Family to As Is. So for Emphasis, for example, the font family would be set to As Is and only the Angle set to Italic. This enables the character tag to be applied to any text, regardless of its paragraph usage. I can apply Emphasis to text defined as Times Roman, Arial, etc., and the font is retained and only the Angle changed.

This is absolutely true, but not the problem you originally reported ;-)

Referring to your original problem, in the ancient version of FrameMaker that I'm currently using (7), character tagging is indeed lost in xrefs. It may be intended behavior, or just an accidental side-effect of the power of FrameMaker's cross-reference formatting. As it's got xref builders that can themselves apply formatting, it can't honor any formatting in the source text. I.e, <$paratext> means just that - the text of the source paragraph, and only the text. The question would be, if FrameMaker *did* honor character formatting in the source of the xref, how would it combine that with formatting applied in the xref format definition?

I can think of some clunky workarounds, but they're just that: clunky. One approach is clearly to avoid character formatting of the the xref source if possible. If you can't, then maybe break the xref source up using inlines so that you can 'restore' the required formatting in the xref format by building the xref in bits with the formatting you want? I.e. the source text would be something like <ParaWithTextasInlineA><CharFormattedBitasInline><ParaWithTextasInlineA>, and your xref format(s) would be something like <$paratext (to part A)><Emphasis (for char formatted bit><$paratext (to part B)>. But then all xrefs would actually be three xrefs, tripling your workload and adding maintenance issues.

How you got about it all depends on the context. I would guess from your original post that you want to use <$paratext> and get the text *and* any character formatting applied to it. But FrameMaker doesn't work like that: you can't 'recover' character formatting from an xref source's text.

I don't know about maker.ini fixes, as FrameMaker 7 for Mac doesn't use maker.ini.

If all the above is nonsense, or completely off-base, I apologize: I'm trying to think in the midst of a gale that's trying to take the roof off.

-- 
Steve [Trim e-mails: use less disk, use less power, use less planet]