[Framers] A bizarre cross-reference issue

[Craig Ede]

Rick’s suggestion highlights one of the pitfalls of FrameMaker’s tagging system. If you overlay a character tag with another character tag, you may get a mix of characteristics in the text depending on the settings for each of the character tags. Anything left “As Is” in the second applied tag will retain the earlier tag’s setting (if it differs from the paragraph settings). However, if you search on the first char tag name, FM will not find it in any text where another char tag has overlaid it, so you lost the ability to search effectively for a tag. You’re then stuck with modifying such text by doing a search for character tag overrides.

Much better to foresee what combinations of characteristics might occur and create separate ‘combo tags’ that do all the things you might want done to the text. Just remember to have a template usage guide that gives your writers this info so that they don’t subvert the intent by just overlaying two tags.

Craig

________________________________
From: Framers <framers-bounces+craigede=hotmail.com at lists.frameusers.com> on behalf of rick at rickquatro.com <rick at rickquatro.com>
....Instead of applying two character formats, I would suggest that you make a
single character format called SuperscriptLink (or something like that) that
has both the superscript position and your link color. This should be more
reliable than applying two separate character formats to the number.

Rick Quatro