How to Exclude a Chapter in a FrameMaker Book

If there are certain chapters in your Adobe FrameMaker book that you’d like to exclude from the final PDF print, you can do that easily by right-clicking on the chapter and selecting File > Exclude. The excluded chapter’s ICON will display a RED outline around it: In the above example, Sample Chapter 2 is excluded…

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What is a FrameMaker Lock File (.lck)?

When you open a FrameMaker file which is stored on a network server (on a Windows or UNIX platform), FM creates a lock file (with the extension .lck) to prevent other users from editing the same file. Mac OS operating system prevents that from happening without creating a .lck file. To make sure your open…

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A Source of Potential Component Conflict when Multiple Authors Work in Structured Authoring Environment

Multiple authors writing “components” instead of “pages” is the future of technical communications (if not technical training and e-learning). When it comes to documentation, it really makes sense to “write once and publish multiple times”, as the saying goes. And that’s only possible if we all get used to writing “components” (sometimes also referred to…

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A FrameMaker Image Import Shortcut to Save You Precious Time

Certain FrameMaker operations will start to become a major nuisance if you repeat them enough. For example, imagine you’re working on a 500- or 1,000-page technical document with 500 illustrations that you need to import from a database. The basic command is very straight forward: File > Import > File… and then you browse, find…

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Adobe TCS3 is here with new XML and Social Media features!

© 2011 Ugur Akinci I’m excited to hear that Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite 3 is introduced with exciting built-in DITA/XML and social media/networking features. I understand both FrameMaker 10 and Robohelp 9 are being shipped as we speak. Here is a great intro by Adobe Senior Product Evangelist RJ Jacquez. It looks like this version…

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How to Align the Punctuation in a FrameMaker Numbered List

A FrameMaker Numbered list looks alright until you reach the TENTH step. Then things usually get ugly due to the way the default PERIOD after the step number shifts right. Here is one such UGLY FrameMaker Numbered list: Here is a method to construct numbered lists that look much better than the one above. We’ll…

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