[Framers] Basic question: hyperlinks to paragraphs

Wed Oct 28 16:15:49 PDT 2020

Hi, Bertrand.

(Sending this to the list to note what I did for my doc.)

I have sent you the original FrameMaker book that I used, but I don't think it will be a great answer for you! I opened this book on my other system that has FM, and I see that I used the hypertext "newlink ..." and "gotolink ..." mechanism to make it work in the PDF. 

Acrobat Pro will then output these as links in the PDF. (As a side-note, other PDF generation tools will not work with FrameMaker to create links in this manner though - that was the one test that has failed in my search for a replacement for Adobe Acrobat!)

I downloaded your Eiffel specification and I see that the amount of manual work would be quite enormous ... even with brute-force global search-and-replace approaches (which is what I now remember doing for my much smaller document).

And, of course, you had mentioned this issue in your original post. 

So, you may want to get Rick Quatro (one of the first responses to the list) to develop a script to automate this - perhaps with an input control file of all the terms (which could be easy to generate from the definition paragraphs you mentioned) for that brute-force search-and-replace. 

If you asked him to make the solution general enough, it could be something you could re-use easily in the future for this spec too. 

Z

-----Original Message-----
From: Framers <framers-bounces+syed.hosain=aeris.net at lists.frameusers.com> On Behalf Of Syed Zaeem Hosain
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2020 1:04 PM
To: An email list for people using Adobe FrameMaker software. <framers at lists.frameusers.com>; Bertrand.Meyer at inf.ethz.ch; 'Shmuel Wolfson' <shmuelw1 at gmail.com>
Cc: meyer at inf.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [Framers] Basic question: hyperlinks to paragraphs

Okay, I found the PDF, but on this system, I don't have FrameMaker running, so I am not sure what I did (was eleven years ago ... and we went to an on-line version afterwards!). I _think_ it was cross-references in FrameMaker ...

Bertrand, I can send the PDF to you to show the result if you want (not to the list, since it will drop attachments) - if this is what you want to do, please let me know and I will look for that FM book on another system.

In this PDF, I did not underline the words, but the cursor changes in Acrobat (to show that clicking on the word will take you elsewhere within the document). Underlining would have been easy enough to add as well though.

Z

As a completely separate BTW, if you put an underscore before and after the word in emails (see -->), _some_ email systems will underline that word in the email. The '*' makes it show in bold.

-----Original Message-----
From: Framers <framers-bounces+syed.hosain=aeris.net at lists.frameusers.com> On Behalf Of Syed Zaeem Hosain
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2020 12:52 PM
To: Bertrand.Meyer at inf.ethz.ch; An email list for people using Adobe FrameMaker software. <framers at lists.frameusers.com>; 'Shmuel Wolfson' <shmuelw1 at gmail.com>
Cc: meyer at inf.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [Framers] Basic question: hyperlinks to paragraphs

Hmmm, I seem to recall doing this in FrameMaker ... I will see if I can find that document and remember how I did it.

Used it in a glossary doc, so I may be able to send it along since it is not proprietary information.

Z

-----Original Message-----
From: Framers <framers-bounces+syed.hosain=aeris.net at lists.frameusers.com> On Behalf Of Bertrand Meyer
Sent: Tuesday, October 27, 2020 5:13 AM
To: 'Shmuel Wolfson' <shmuelw1 at gmail.com>; 'An email list for people using Adobe FrameMaker software.' <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Cc: meyer at inf.ethz.ch
Subject: Re: [Framers] Basic question: hyperlinks to paragraphs

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:
> 2015 Silver, 2016 Silver, 2017 Bronze*2, 2019 Silver For more about 
> Real Bread, see <http://www.realbreadcampaign.org>
> For more about me, see <http://www.linkedin.com/in/steverickaby>
> For superficial waffle, see <https://www.facebook.com/steve.rickaby.9>
>
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