Posts Tagged ‘FrameMaker’
How to Control Widow and Orphan Lines in Your Technical Document
You should avoid widow and orphan lines in your technical documents. A WIDOW line is one that ends up all alone at the top of the page. An ORPHAN line is the opposite: it’s that single line that sits at the bottom of the page. Both look weak (especially an orphan HEADER) and should be…
Read MoreHow 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…
Read MoreWhat 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…
Read MoreA 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…
Read MoreA FrameMaker Shortcut to Scroll from one Document TAB to Another
Adobe FrameMaker nicely opens all your documents side by side in tabs. Whether they are parts of a book or not, if you have three open FrameMaker documents in your editing window, for example, then you’d have 3 tabs displayed at the top of your screen: Here is an easy way to scroll and navigate…
Read MoreA 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…
Read MoreAdobe 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…
Read MoreHow 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…
Read More3 Ways to Correct the Misaligned Items in a FrameMaker List
Do you have a FrameMaker list in your technical document that looks like this? The most common way to correct the misaligned items in a FrameMaker list is to delete the list and recreate it. If you want to change the alignment of a single item in a FrameMaker list, highlight it and then press…
Read MoreHow to Configure Column and Header Layout for a FrameMaker Document
You can create FrameMaker documents with complex column and header layouts. I’d like to show some of those possibilities on this sample one-column document: (Click on all images to enlarge them) As you can see, this document does not have any sidebars and a sidebar is always a nice layout feature to have in a…
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