Single Source Diary - Day 2

Yesterday I added the default templates for printed output. Today I will work on making them look like our Framemaker books.

Today's disclaimer:
This is the "Innocents Abroad" (a travelogue) version of the process of single-sourcing a project from 4 sources to a single Flare project. If I survive this, I intend to blog a Mapquest version that offers the fastest stepwise route from here to there, probably based on the "Short and Sweet" summaries and looking back. In the meantime, when you run out of patience with these ramblings, you can probably do these tasks in shorter time than I by using the Flare Printed Output Guide PDF as your bible.

Dose of Hope:
This book layout stuff is complicated anywhere, in Frame or Flare or whatever. Flare is trying to provide the same level of flexibility as Frame, and Frame is famous/notorious for being the swiss army knife of technical book design. Realize that if you can get it right, you only need to do it once and you can re-use it for every project.

Short and Sweet:
I was able to build a Title page layout in Flare that echoes (pretty much) what our title page in Frame does, using the default frontmatter template and the Page Layout Editor. I still need to make adjustments to the graphic logos because there were two on one line in Frame and that is hard to duplicate in Flare. I tried using a table but the right-justified graphic is not lining up correctly.

So I still have some issues to solve, but the good news is that by jumping ahead and defining a titlepage.htm, a print target, and a one topic print toc, I was able to output the title page and Copyright page to PDF and they looked dern close to the Frame version.

Groddy Details:
Might as well start with the title page. Ours includes a right-justified product title, release number book title and revision number 2 5/8 inches down from the top (that is where the page frame on the title page starts), and at the bottom a company logo and address. No header, footer or page number. In Frame, this is page one of a two-page document; the second page is copyright and trademark info, plus some publication data. I did not mention that our book format is 9x7.5 but the margins are placed so that printing on an 8.5x11 page looks presentable.

In Frame the the book title stuff is text, while the bottom logo and address is two graphics and text on the master page. I am going to try to build a snippet for this.

But before that, I need to deal with something in the Page Layout file. Our help stylesheet uses a non-repeating graphic of the product name as a page header. This seems to be showing up on the Page Layout template (though a quick test seems to indicate it does not print or PDF there). Still, it looks hideous and distracting. So I want to see if I can modify the css to hide it for the print version.

So far, no luck. It appears in the first line of the body and in the footer, despite my setting all these elenments to have no background image. When I look at the xml for the frontmatter page layout, no sign of the graphic or a call to the stylesheet. It does show up in the output (yes, I can generate a target output even this early on; there just are not any real contents), which is bad. Clearly I need to do some digging to find out where this is coming from.

Okay, what I found out is that the graphic was defined in the default medium stylesheet. (There are three mediums - default, print, and non-print). So it was showing up by inheritance in the print medium stylesheet. So I nuked it in the default medium. That made it disappear everywhere. So I added it back into the non-print medium. Now it shows up when I edit or preview a page (an existing topic) in Layout Mode Web, Medium non-pint. It is hidden in Layout Mode Print, medium print and medium default, but visible in medium non-print. (Layout Mode determines what your XML editor looks like; to over simplify, whether it looks like you are editing a help topic or a print document page.)

But the graphic still showed up on the page layout file, until I edited its property sheet and chose the Print Condition tag under conditional text. Then the graphic disappeared. Curiously when I then deselected Print and Okayed that, the graphic did not re-appear. Hmm. This makes me think that it is an artifact of some buried setting (this project was imported from the old RoboHelp back in the Flare 1 days, so I think there are still gremlins in there, like a liberal sprinkling of links to old pal ehlpdhtm.js, which survived the import process though it seems to serve no purpose. Perhaps a Madcap coder was nostalgic for files from the old ehelp days).

Do I have to tell you that I think this is over-complicated? I am sure I will recognize why it is set up this way someday, maybe even soon. It is flexible, I'll give it that.

Okay, enough of that crap. Let's get back to the basics. The Frontmatter.flgpl file has 5 page layouts defined. The T page must be the title page.

So I am going to attempt to move the top margin down 2 5/8 inches like in the Frame template. First I click on the ruler on the left of the editor and change the measurement from pixels to inches. Then I click on the gray frame and drag it down. Oops, the ruler is in tenths. I refuse to disclose how I figured out that 5/8 = .625 inches. So I drag the border down just below 2 and 6/10, probably to 2.650 given the grid, which I am way to lazy to change. But while I am lazy, I make up for that deficiency by being I am easily distracted. So I go search in Flare help for the new Zoom feature.

Darn. Looks like that works in the XML editor, not the Page Layout Editor. Oh well. .65 is close enough for now (I realize later that I can set it more precisely from a right-click selection that opens up a dialog box).

That should correctly set the top of the page for the Book title. Now I have to think about the logo and address and the snippet thing, and how to position that. I think I could shorten the main frame and add a separate frame for the logo and address. Before I do that I want to look back at the Framemaker version. That sticks the text part in an unanchored text frame that is not part of the flow, and places a grouped graphic of both logos in an anchored frame within that frame. I will try a separate frame in the Flare template and see how that works. I am not sure how I get the snippet in there. back to looking at the Printed output guide.

Back again, and I think I am going to try to add this as a footer frame, to which you can directly add text and graphics. I believe that this will only appear on the title page, as this page of the layout (because it is designated as the Title payout) will be used only for page one of the frontmatter.

Note that this layout has an Empty page, which the book says will immediately follow the title page. For our books, because the title page is actually an inside title page on the right side (the outside cover is spearately printed), the next, left, page is used for the copyright/trademark stuff, and should not be blank like a cardstock type cover, so I think I need to delete the Empty page from the layout. We will see.

So I am moving the bottom of the body frame up one inch and creating a one-inch text frame at the bottom. I am making this a footer frame becuase the bible ominously says that decoration frames are not support in Framemaker output, and while I don't expect to output to frame, I want to play it same and not remove options.

Next I click F2 to edit the frame (opens the Frame Contents Editor). I click the insert a Picture icon, and realize I have to export the picture from Frame, because it is copied into the book, not referenced (long story about master pages skipped). Of course, the picure is in reality two gifs in a grouped frame, with the originals huge in size and displayed at 15% in frame, so I am going to fake it by reducing them size first, just to get a facimile graphic. That done, I pick it and place it, then type in the Address text (I will variable or snippet this later, for now I want immediate gratification and I am itching to click preview somewhere.) Bad news is the lo rez version of the graphi looks so lo rez. But overall the page is correct. I will try other stuff later, like re-sizing using a new Flare Object feature, and a table to allow two grapics on one line.

I have to finick around with it to make it fit yet loook like frame. But I did it after some heartburn. Then I created some styles (print medium only) to handle the book title, part number, product, etc. I typed those into titlepage.htm (that I also created). Then I created a Toc for the print version, and a print target to PDF, clicked build, and I got a 2 page PDF with a title page that looked surprisingly like my frame book.

I will go over those steps tomorrow when I do them for real.