FM12 has char format in xref been fixed?

[Carol J. Elkins]

Thanks, Steve. My struggle right now is with cross-references to 
paragraphs that, in addition to regular text,  house hypertext links 
formatted with a Character tag that makes the text blue; and 
cross-references that house an italicized citation to a book. The 
character-formatted text in those cross-refs lose their character 
formatting. I use cross-references because I want to single-source 
the source text.  I can't avoid character formatting in these 
instances. And as you stated, breaking one cross-ref into three 
separate cross-refs to access the text before and after the 
character-formatted text is impractical.

Just as I can import text insets and retain their formatting, I would 
hope that eventually Adobe will give me the option to use cross-refs 
while retaining the source formatting. Call it a feature enhancement.

Carol

At 12:54 PM 2/4/2014, you wrote:
>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]