[Framers] Basic question: hyperlinks to paragraphs

[Bertrand Meyer]

No. Let me explain. This is the text of a language standard (the previous version is an ISO standard, International Standards Organization). It is written very rigorously. (It is the result of many years of laborious effort by many people.) See https://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-367.htm. Some words have their ordinary meanings and others have meanings introduced with a rigorous definition in the standard itself. In the previous version, such words are underlined. For example, a sentence such as

	This particular beast might be a *cat* or it might be a *dog* or it might be an *unclassified* beast. 

(I have the impression that the remailer removes underlining so I am using asterisks, as in *underlined_word*, instead.) The example sentence uses underlining to expressthat the underlined notions, "cat", "dog" and "unclassified", have a formal definition somewhere in the text.

Quite understandably, people have started to ask that all such underlined elements should be links to the corresponding definitions. (Otherwise, the reader has to run searches all the time.)

This kind of thing is needed for any normative text of that kind, which includes precise definitions.

In FrameMaker terms, all the definitions are in paragraphs of one specific type (format in FrameMaker terminology), so the obvious thing to do from the writer's perspective would be to be able to select the target from a list of paragraphs of that type, as with cross-references. But cross-references don't work since they impose a format based on the target, not the source.

-- BM

-----Original Message-----
From: Shmuel Wolfson [mailto:shmuelw1 at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2020 12:55
To: Bertrand.Meyer at inf.ethz.ch; An email list for people using Adobe FrameMaker software. <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Subject: Re: [Framers] Basic question: hyperlinks to paragraphs

Can't you just write "this is explained in the discussion of cat problems (page xx)"?

On 27-Oct-20 12:27 PM, Bertrand Meyer wrote:
> Actually my problem is not exactly this. I am happy with link targets 
> being paragraphs. (They already are.) My problem is the link sources: 
> I don't want them to be in a "cross-reference format" in the 
> FrameMaker sense, whose displayed text is deduced from the target 
> (e.g. "section 4.5"); they have to be arbitrary text.
>
> Thanks,
>
> -- BM
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Rickaby [mailto:srickaby at wordmongers.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2020 11:03
> To: Bertrand.Meyer at inf.ethz.ch; An email list for people using Adobe 
> FrameMaker software. <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
> Subject: Re: [Framers] Basic question: hyperlinks to paragraphs
>
>> Thanks for the comments. A cross-references forces me to use a 
>> cross-reference format for the link, e.g. "section 4.5". I cannot use 
>> a reference format, I want to use an arbitrary text for the linking 
>> text, as in "this is explained in the discussion of cat problems", 
>> where the underlined text (I hope the mailing list mailer keeps the 
>> underline) is my own text but a link to some chosen place.
>>
>> Hyperlinks to this but force me in each case to add two commands, a 
>> gotolink at the source and a newlink at the target, which is 
>> horrendously tedious if one has thousands such cases. The newlink is 
>> not conceptually necessary since all the targets are paragraphs so I 
>> should be able simply to choose from a paragraph list as with
> cross-references.
>
>  From memory I used to use the double-link method for this, but I 
> never needed to do it very often. I appreciate your problem. AFAIK you 
> are stymied by FrameMaker's internal model, which only allows xrefs to 
> named styles, i.e. at the paragraph level, rather than to specific 
> runs of text such as a sentence. If there's a way to do this that 
> doesn't involve a double-link process, I'd be interested to hear of 
> it, even though I seldom use FrameMaker these days.
>
> --
> Baker Steve, aka Steve Rickaby BSc MBCS CITP AMBHI Tel : +44 1 736 
> 810575 Five times World Bread Awards winner:
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>
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