FrameMaker – Tech, writing, and tech writing

Downgrading Adobe Software

Most writers I’ve worked with don’t know that Adobe will allow you to downgrade a product by one version when you purchase the current version. This could come in useful, for example, if you have an expanding documentation team using software that’s not backwards-compatible (I’m thinking RoboHelp and FrameMaker in particular): instead of upgrading licenses for everyone on the team, you can buy current licenses for the newcomers and downgrade them to be compatible with the software the team is already using. More information is available at Adobe’s page on volume licensing policies.

It would be nice if you could roll back by more than one version, but given the cost of some of these products, having even that much flexibility can be enormously valuable!

Useful website with many tech writing tips and tricks

I’ve often found myself trying to figure out the solution to a problem in Framemaker, RoboHelp, or Word, and eventually wound up on a forum or page where the wonderful Peter Grainge has supplied the solution. His website – http://www.grainge.org/ – is a carefully curated treasure trove of tricks and fixes to get around a million problems tech writers encounter every day – I don’t know why I don’t just head straight there more often. I’d highly recommend you take a peek if you’ve never visited before.

Disappearing Text in PDFs – Part 3

Because I disable commenting on posts a short while after publication (due to insane quantities of spam), this comment was left by Ryan Bernard on an unrelated post, but it’s potentially useful, so bears getting a post of its own:

I read you posts about tables going blank in FrameMaker. The solutions you presented did not work for me. What worked was to use File > Save As PDF and when you get the PDF properties dialog, turn off “Tagged PDFs” settings. I believe this is the little mischief maker we have all been looking for… It worked for me in multiple instances, without fiddling with anything else. I believe Tagging is used for disability presentation or whatever it’s called. Some applications/clients may require that, but most don’t in my experience.

Other possible solutions to this problem are described in these posts:

Style Overrides in FrameMaker

One of the reasons I prefer FrameMaker over Word, is that it doesn’t automagically update your paragraph styles as you work. Word has a tendency to either add new items to the list when you make a tweak (Normal, Normal but Bold, Normal but Italic, Normal but 12pt and blue…), or to modify an existing style to match your one-off customization, and all of a sudden a paragraph two chapters back is mysteriously rendering in 14pt instead of 10 and when you fix it that extra-large warning note you were working on earlier has gone back to 10pt “all by itself”. There are settings buried in the software to determine what exactly happens when you modify a style, and where the change propagates to, but Word works in mysterious ways, and I just don’t have the time or energy to figure it all out.

I favour the simple elegance of how FrameMaker does things:

The paragraph and character styles for the selected text are shown in FrameMaker’s status bar.
If there’s a manual override to a paragraph style (for example, a change of font), an asterisk appears beside the style name in FrameMaker’s status bar.

If there is a manual override, you can check what the original definition is in the Paragraph Designer, and decide whether the override is justified or not.

If an override is justified:

For a genuine one-off situation, you might want to just leave the override in place. Bear in mind, that if you reimport styles and say to remove overrides, you’ll lose the modification at that point.
For a recurring situation, you might want to create a new style. For example, if you want the first paragraph of every section to be blue and italic to designate it as introductory material, that’s worth a new style. (Click Commands | New Format in the Paragraph Designer.)
If you decide the override is one you’d like to see everywhere this paragraph style is used, then you’ll want to update the existing style to match the modified version. (Click Update All in the Paragraph Designer.)
And finally, if you decide the override is invalid, you should just re-apply the correct style instead and move on. (Click Reset in the Paragraph Designer.)

Simple and elegant. Me likey.

Disappearing Text in PDFs – Part 2

Following on from a post I wrote a while back on text that was present in the source file, but mysteriously vanished on saving to PDF, here’s a similar incident I encountered with a different resolution.

In this case, again authoring in FrameMake, I was working on a number of reference manuals in the range of 500-800 pages long a piece. All was going well until it came time to publish one of the longer books as a PDF. On checking the generated file to make sure all looked well, I skimmed through quickly. First few pages, fine… next few pages, fine… next few pages, … hang on – what’s that big gap there about?… next few pages, now all the tables are blank!… skip quickly to the end… all that’s left is the header/footer rulings!

Starting over and saving the PDF again gave the same results – in fact, it looked like problems might just be happening earlier and earlier in the document each time.

First port of call was a few “turn it off and back on again”s. First the software, then the whole machine. After a reboot, the same problem kept recurring.

Next stop, fiddling with Acrobat settings, with an occasional reboot for good measure. Still no joy.

A bit of a Google, trying out a few random suggestions, and finally I hit on the solution that worked: delete the font cache (C:\Windows\System32\FNTCACHE.DAT (that’s .DAT – not .dll! Don’t mess with your .dlls or you’ll go blind!)), reboot, save the pdf immediately.

The font cache is regenerated when you reboot, so if the same problem arises again, lather, rinse and repeat.

In the case of the document I was working on, I had to delete the font cache and reboot between every save of the document or text started disappearing again. Depending on the length and complexity of the document you’re working on, your mileage may vary.