🚀 go-pugleaf

Gerry,

The paper is "Automatic Bleeding Thumb Tabs" by Brad Anderson
presented at the 2000 FrameUsers conference in San Diego. It was on
the FrameUsers site, but the site has been down for a while. You could
try to contact Brad directly for this - the info is on the frameusers
main page. He did use FrameScript to fully automate this.

The gist of his technique was to create the tab in a background text
frame on the master pages, by placing an inline anchored frame (at
insertion point) that contained a textframe that had a single table.
The anchored frame was sized to the tab and filled with the required
background colour or graphic. The inner text frame and table(cell)
were also sized appropriately keeping in mind how much of a bleed was
required. The paratag in the table cell was in the reverse/knockout
colour for contrast and vertically centered in the table cell. The tab
text content was picked up via a variable from a running h/f marker or
from the appropriate section paratag [whichever suits you situation
best]. This background text frame was then rotated 90 and placed along
the appropriate side of the page to create a bleed. To get the tabs to
automatically run down the page, another variable for a running h/f
marker was inserted in the background text frame *before* the anchored
frame. Then the source for this running h/f marker for the chapter was
inserted in the title line. This marker held the a number of tabs (\t
entries) to correspond to its position down the side. You had to do
some math to figure out the tab position based upon the page size, tab
width and number of desired tabs. Once you had the tab increment, you
set this tab interval (to Repeat Every) for the paratag holding the
anchored frame. Viola, it then "magically" marches down the side of
the page based upon the number of tabs that you enter in the marker.

Another semi-automated way could be to use FM's colour views. You have
up to six different views available to you and you could treat them as
pseudo-layers. If you aren't currently using Views to hide anything,
then you can create up to six tab positions to cycle through.

You'll need to define six colour names (e.g. Tab1, Tab2, etc. to Tab6)
for the background colour that you want to use for your bleeding tabs.
These should all have the same colour values.

Then create six bleeding tabs in your template along each side of the
respective master pages and colour each one with the Tab1 through Tab6
colour respectively (or how many you want to use).

On the Colour Views, set for each view the tab colours not
corresponding to the view number to be invisible, i.e. for View 3, you
would set Tab1, Tab2, Tab4, Tab5 and Tab5 to be invisible. Five of
these should be the only colours in the Invisible column for each
view.

Then to have tabs marching down the sides, just use the View
appropriate for the chapter position, i.e. if it's Chapter 3, do the
"<esc> v 3" keyboard shortcut to set the tab. For chapter 6, it's
<esc> v 6; for chapter 7, it would be <esc> v 1, etc.

Hopefully, this will give you some ideas as to how to speed this up
for your situation.