🚀 go-pugleaf

Philip:

IXgen includes the means of definining a list of terms. IXgen will then locate and offer one the choice of marking that instance with an Index marker.

See <http://www.fsatools.com/>

It's not as automated as you may be thinking of, but it works moderately well after one sets it up...

Cheers & hope this helps,
Riley

Riley, thanks for the tip. I'll give IXgen a try after the company returns from their weekend break.

In the meantime, I notice that if I place an index marker next to a cross-reference marker, sometimes the cross-reference marker is deleted.

I'm curious what an experienced FM user would do to avoid this. Is it advisable never to place an index marker next to a cross-reference marker, or do you just need to do so carefully?

Philip, is the xref marker actually disappearing or is it just that the two markers are visually very closely together, without a space to separate them. Many, many markers can visually appear to be a single marker.

To confirm, place your cursor a character or two to the left of the "marker pile". Then click your right arrow key once, moving one character at a time. Notice that when you move over the marker symbol it will take more than one click to get to the right of the next visible character, corresponding to the number of markers that are piled up.

The only other issue I've come across is that occasionally a marker can actually be selected by simply placing the cursor beside it, a very small mouse movement, but the selection area is so small that it does not appear to be selected. So then when the second marker is inserted, it does replace the previous marker. To avoid this I sometimes place my cursor at the intended location and then use the left arrow/right arrow first, before actually inserting the second marker, to ensure that nothing is selected.

Sheila, sometimes the xref marker actually disappears, generating an unresolved reference diagnostic. I had adopted the strategy you mention of moving the cursor right and left using the arrow keys. But I wanted to ask my question to be sure that I wasn't inviting trouble by putting markers next to each other. Based on your reply, I conclude that I'm not and that I just need to be careful.

Discussion of side-by-side markers is a bit of a digression, but since it's been made I'll add the following.

FrameMaker documents that will generated as online help (OLH) systems end up with a lot of different special-purpose markers to control such things a control OLH pagination, output file names, et al. These are in addition to Index markers, etc.

What I do in files with lots of markers is use named character styles to specify a unique color for each type of marker; I also typically specify a "seeable" font size that's neither too big nor too small.

Next, I apply a marker's assigned character style to one instance, then use Edit > Copy Special > Character format to put the character format on the clipboard. From there, I use Find/Change to Find all markers of a given type and Paste the associated character style onto it.

Voila! All markers of a given type are now easy to spot when working in content containing them...

Cheers & hope this helps,
Riley

Riley, thanks for the idea. I'd never thought of coloring the markers, although I color my book text to distinguish styles.

I tried your idea and notice that the markers are piled on top of each other in the order that they're inserted. So if I want a lower marker to be visible, I need to stretch it.

This means that your visibility strategy will only work in the general case if markers are not piled up since you can't count on a certain type of marker being at the bottom of the pile. Am I correct in inferring, then, that you avoid creating a pile of markers?

I'm sorry for this off-topic response...

> Then click your right arrow key once, ...

Do you actually use the word "click" for pressing a key
on the keyboard? Wouldn't that be confusing if you
also use "click" for pressing a mouse button?

Just curious.

-- 
/Thomas Michanek

Philip:

Am I correct in inferring, then, that you avoid creating a pile of markers?

Yes -- I generally avoid stacking markers side-by-side. I just find it easier to do it that way.

But I also try to place markers of a given type in a consistent way. For example, I generally place Index markers at the start of the second word in a paragraph, OLH filename markers at the start of the second word in a level-1 heading. And so on...

Cheers & hope this helps,
Riley

After working for a fair number of hours on creating an index, I realize that to get the result that I want -- of a highly organized, meaningful index -- I must place each marker by hand, giving it the label and the level of my choice.

I also realize that the tool that would improve the efficiency of this work is an improved Find capability. I'm posting this message to see if there is such a tool, as well as for any advice that an experienced user may have to offer.

In placing index makers, I do the following.

I have the Find window and the Marker window open. I use the Find window to search for a key word or phrase, and when I get a hit, I decide whether to place a marker at the given instance or not. In making this decision, I may search for index markers in the vicinity in order to maintain consistency and to avoid redundancy in the markers. Sometimes I search for markers of type Index. Sometimes I search for any marker in order to pick up cross-reference markers, as well.

What would speed this procedure up is to have two Find windows, one for key search and one for marker search. Second best would be a drop-down menu of prior choices for the text field in the Find window.

I tried IXgen, and it does provide a second Find window for key search. However, this doesn't serve my purpose because I must cancel the IXgen Find window in order to access the document window.

I found Index Tools Pro, from Silicon Prairie Software, very useful when doing detailed index work. It will insert the content of your markers in the document flow as visible text, and then �collapse� it again into markers. Shareware, so you can try it out for free, and very reasonably priced.

 <http://www.siliconprairiesoftware.com/>

You can also use IXGen to open and display all the markers, which makes Find more useful.

Rick Quatro's advanced find tool is also an improvement.

Art

David,

Thanks for the tip on Index Tools Pro. I just read the manual to see how it's designed. It has a great design: it changes Index markers into conditional text so that you work with conditional text instead of actual index markers. That's truly brilliant because you can use all of FM's editing capabilities on conditional text, and you can show and hide the conditional text as desired. And the software costs only $30. If it works as stated, without serious problems, it's a steal.

I sent the company email to see if they can do the same thing for cross-reference markers and cross-references. I want to be able to find and edit cross-reference markers and cross-references as if they are normal text.

Philip