[Framers] Toggling Condition Indicators Individually

[Fred Ridder]

But I wasn't suggesting it as a solution for your problem, Lin.


I was only trying to head off listmembers getting the wrong impression from Peter's post. A FrameMaker template actually has *lots* of space where information can be added to make it self-documenting, and I can personally attest to the way this can really save your bacon. We all complain when software developers don't adequately comment their code (I once spent hundreds of hours tracing through underdocumented code in what was supposed to be a foundation library for our customers to use to streamline their own development), but underdocumented templates are just as bad.

-FR

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From: Lin Sims <ljsims.ml at gmail.com>
Sent: Friday, November 18, 2016 1:41 PM
To: Peter Gold
Cc: Fred Ridder; Frame Users
Subject: Re: [Framers] Toggling Condition Indicators Individually

As I said to Fred, the problem is that this information has to be VISIBLE in the deliverable.

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 1:28 PM, Peter Gold <peter at petergold.photography<mailto:peter at petergold.photography>> wrote:
Good reminder, Fred!.

There's something warm and fuzzy when a long-dormant FM feature gets recognized for its current usefulness.

Thanks.

My point in suggesting the non-main-content area was intended to make the non-printing memory-jogging material always visible to authors, but not in deliverables, without any manual effort to display or conceal it.



On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 12:05 PM, Fred Ridder <DocuDoc at hotmail.com<mailto:DocuDoc at hotmail.com>> wrote:

Unless something has changed in recent versions of FrameMaker, there is no need to restrict yourself to "non-main-content areas" on master pages. The main text frames on the master pages are only *placeholder* frames. You can fill them up with notes and instructions and whatever  else you want to put in there, and none of it will ever appear in the deliverable document. And since you can add more master pages beyond what you actually need for your document design, there's a relatively unlimited amount of space available.


I used this trick extensively when I was working with a group of more than 25 writers at a previous employer (back in the FM6 days) when we were migrating a hundred or so documents from Word to FrameMaker. I haven't had need to use this trick in about a decade, but I can't imagine that Adobe would have changed the basic document model so completely that it no longer works.

-FR

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Lin Sims