Giving some paragraphs a background colour with DITA

[Maxwell Hoffmann]

FYI - for those who haven't reviewed all new features in FrameMaker 12, a new "Pgf box" command is available on the Advanced Tab of the Paragraph Designer. Unlike single cell tables, the new paragraph background color creates a "box" of color than can break columns or pages.

Naturally, these values can be replicated as format rules in the EDD.

If you wish to see a brief video of this feature, you may view it here: http://adobe.ly/1g1ycpJ

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From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Scott Prentice
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2014 9:25 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Giving some paragraphs a background colour with DITA

Hi Rebecca...

For FM-DITA questions you'll probably get more replies by posting to the framemaker-dita Yahoo group.

Applying coloring/formatting to paragraphs via @outputclass is fairly easy by adding context rules to the <p> (or whatever) element definition that check for a match of that outputclass value and assigning the necessary paragraph tag or style overrides.

Doing the same with table cells is not so easy. While you can specify the overall table format based on the tgroup/@outputclass, there aren't any EDD context rules that you can use to assign properties to specific table cells or rows. Apparently FM11 added some new read/write rules that can assign these properties. I'm not familiar with setting these up, but you can read more about it in this post on the Adobe FrameMaker forum ..

    http://forums.adobe.com/message/6026704

BTW .. I'm in the process of developing a new feature in DITA-FMx that will allow you to specify outputclass values for rows and cells. This should be available in FMx 2.0 when that's released.

Cheers,

...scott


On 1/21/14 8:26 PM, rebecca officer wrote:
Hi everyone

We're going to be using FrameMaker (12) to output PDFs from DITA. We'd like certain paragraphs and/or table cells to have a background colour.

Our specific usecase is that we produce multi-switch config examples. Sometimes, we find that each switch's content takes up more than a page, and that all the switches are nearly identical. It really helps if we can colour the content differently, so users (and us!) can see whether they're on switch 1, 2 or 3.

We thought maybe outputclass would let us do this, but so far we haven't figured out how. We've found online references to doing this with the open toolkit, and for HTML with CSS, but nothing about Framemaker.

Is there a way to use the outputclass attribute to style how some elements appear in FrameMaker? If not, is there another way to get the effect we're after?

Thanks very much!
Rebecca
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