If you are a lonely Technical Writer in your company crying F1 while encountering technical issues with tools like FrameMaker or RoboHelp, then here is the solution. All you need is a LinkedIn account. There are many groups related to technical communication available within LinkedIn. There are some interesting discussions related with technical writing too happens in these groups. Few of the useful groups that I follow are as follows:
Usually people prefer to import a word document than directly writing (typing) on a FrameMaker page. While importing the word document, the tables in the word document would not get imported properly in the FM file. Here is the solution:
This is the solution that http://allexperts.com provides for this issue. I haven’t checked this as I am yet to install the FM . So I would be happy if you try it out and let me know in the comment section. 🙂
Recently, the same friend raised one interesting query. It looked very simple. Here we go:
I have included chapter names, heading level 1, level 2 and so on as book marks in a FrameMaker book and generated a PDF. When I open that PDF for the first time, I would like to see only chapter names as bookmarks not all the heading levels expanded. Should I do something with FrameMaker settings..? This was her query.
Expected:
Only Chapters as Bookmark
Actual:
chapters Expanded
As per my knowledge, FrameMaker has nothing to do with this query, it’s the Acrobat Professional that you need to do with some settings change while opening the PDF. (As I don’t have a copy of Adobe professional, I was not able to mention the exact menu to change the settings.)
Later she got the exact answer from www.allexperts.com posted by Mr. Wayne. Here is the exact saying:
“If you “Open” the document in Adobe Professional – and you are using Adobe 6.0 or higher. You might look under the preferences screen and see if there might be a setting that says something like – “remember last” and check or uncheck the box depending on how the text is worded.
You might also just try opening the document in Adobe Professional – and then “collapse” all the bookmarks then save the document and reopen it and see if the bookmarks stay collapsed.
Try the following: Open Distiller and then select Settings > Security and then make sure the following box is UNCHECKED – “NO CHANGING THE DOCUMENT.”
So the exact solution is:
You will find the bookmarks in same state as you needed.
It sounds so simple. Is it not..? 🙂
Recently, one of my friend who is also a TW, came across with an issue while updating the book in FrameMaker. The issue is quite simple.
She generated a Table of Contents (TOC). She has got some five chapters in a book. Later, she included some content in one of those five chapters and updated the book. Now she has to re-generate a new TOC again. But she was not able to carry out the task.
After getting an e-mail from her, I tried to reproduce the same scenario. I just wanted to get the same error message so that I can investigate the problem in detail. So, I created five dummy chapters, included in a book and generated a TOC. Now, I included some content in one of the chapter, saved and updated the book. Here is the climax. I tried to re-generate the TOC, yes, I got it without any error. 🙂
So what went wrong in her case…?
The solution was so simple: I kept all the five chapters open and minimized while re-generating the TOC. But she closed all those chapters and tried to re-generate a TOC. Though simple, quite annoying, right..?
She was also surprised and raised one valid query.
Should we keep open all the chapters even if we have 100 chapters in the book..?
My answer is still ‘YES’ though sounds ridiculous. Only Adobe people can give a convincing answer for this query, I believe. 🙂
A Writer's Day 