Flare back to Frame: lose bullet characters

[Ed Marshall]

All,

I and the employee technical writer at one of my contracts have been experimenting with Flare 3.1 and Frame 8.

The imports work fine. I've worked with a lot of convertors and I'm impressed with the quality of the import and minimal to no post-conversion cleanup from the process.

The company needs to deliver PDFs with the product.

When we export the Flare files back to Frame 8 (so we can generate the PDFs), we lose our bullet characters for lists. They get replaced with straight quotes.

I've shown the sample projects to Flare tech support and they are working on it but don't have an easy solution for us yet.

We want to import the Frame sources to Flare and then write in Flare, and only export back to Frame to generate the PDFs (at least until Flare 4).

Has anyone else encountered this problem and have a quick solution?

Thank you.

Ed Marshall

[AprilC]

Just to remove the straight quotes, try updating the Character catalog item (usually the DiscBulletFont or CircleBulletFont) to use the correct font. Another option is to open the bullet's Paragraph designer, and on the Numbering tab, change the Character Format to the default paragraph font.

[jpeffley]

I am encountering the same thing - I believe that when I used FrameMaker 7.2, the bullets came through fine. I don't want to have to correct things in FrameMaker (already having to do a few workarounds relating to Index headers and setting bookmarks for the pdf - that I hope will be corrected in Flare v4). I'm going to try uninstalling Frame 8 and using 7.2 - not the best option.

[jbarwick]

By the way...this is off topic, but you mentioned in your post that you are modifying index headers in FrameMaker after generation...

I can only guess that is because the header is missing...I've bugged this 1.5 years ago when I was working directly with development daily to patch the FrameMaker output....but they haven't fixed this.

You want a workaround? I found this out yesterday....

1) ENSURE that the "index" topic (the topic containing the index proxy) is in the TOC as a TOC entry
2) For the TOC entry, select "Start New Section" "Start New Chapter". Continue the current section/volume

<TocEntry
Title="Index"
Link="/Content/manual/DocIndex.htm"
SectionNumberReset="same"
VolumeNumberReset="same"
StartSection="true"
MasterPage="/Content/Resources/Master Pages/Index.flmsp"
StartChapter="true"
SectionNumber="1"
ChapterNumberReset="same"
PageNumber="1"
PageNumberReset="reset" />
</CatapultToc>

3) If you don't want to restart numbering, then in the master page style, ensure that the number start is <default>. The "PageNumberReset="reset" in the TOC style....not sure that does anything.

4) In the master page ENSURE there is a FIRST PAGE header and FIRST PAGE footer. In the style, make sure the mc-leader style is "first page". You will also need an "All pages" header (or odd/even headers if you use them (as I do))

Voila...you now have a header on ALL your index pages.

Took me 1.5 years to figure this out.

I am still using FrameMaker 7.2...so, I don't have a bullet problem.

[jbarwick]

Bookmarks:

All PDF bookmarks automatically generated for H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 tags.

I noticed that the PDF generator in acrobat distiller only had H1 and H2 defined. (on my PC). I ended up having to modify distiller to include H3 tags from Flare as bookmarks.

Note: I created a style class <p class="normal"> (e.g. p.normal { } ) that looks exactly has H3 (section headers). H tags are automatically added to the TOC proxy (I'm sure you know). But, sometimes I don't want section headers to be included in the TOC proxy.

I'm curious to know if FrameMaker to Flare import created the H1/H2... tags appropriately for TOC proxy entries.