FrameMaker ExtendScript Webinar Materials

[Steve Rickaby]

At 15:30 -0400 30/3/15, Rick Quatro wrote:

>3) Any ideas for automation that you have identified in your FrameMaker
>workflow. What are your production bottlenecks? These could range anywhere
>from a few repetitive actions that you find yourself doing consistently to
>major workflows. I am open to any and all suggestions.

Oddly, someone on another tech author group I'm on has just asked for more or less the same sort of input, but for Word, for an article. Here's my starter for 10 (Brit expression) in case it's helpful (assuming that books haven't gone out of fashion)...

Most of my workflow for technical books needed manual work and was not that susceptible to automation, but the time when I resorted most to simple automation was for indexing.

A simple example of a short script might be to create a marker from selected text using predefined character formats. For example, select 'John Doe' in body text by searching for two consecutive words that both had leading caps and have an index marker created containing

<Name>Doe, John<Default Para Format>

optionally with a controllable custom marker type if I was creating the main or a subsidiary dictionary.

I expect that ExtendScript could automate this in such a way the marker type was not overridden if the selected text already contained a marker, which was certainly an issue in FrameMaker 7, and could loop through an entire document or book. The method I used, with keystroke macros, required a second pass to change all the markers that were incorrectly set as hypertext or xref markers back to index (or custom) markers.

I will look forward to the webinar with interest.

-- 
Steve