Single Source Diary - Day 6

Today (virtual Monday; I am blogging Tuesday about Monday) , I am going to copy into the "new" template project the page layouts I have previously worked on.

Then I will make some modifications to the default medium stylesheet so that the headings positioning match the headings in our Framemaker books.

Here is a tip - if you are building page templates and stylesheets, and thus doing a build every 15 minutes or less, it might make sense to do this in a stub of a project rather than your 1000 topic monster. It is pretty easy to copy your template stuff and some samples into an empty project, do the work, and then copy them back into the real thing. Logical, but I found that it was easy to do the work in place and forget that when you ran a build, you were building everything every time.

The copy-in of Page Layouts worked. Then I made the modifications so that the Headings were positioned in the 'side-head' area of the pages (Using the negative left margin strategy documented [very clearly] in the Flare Help). Because Flare doesn't quite do side-heads quite the same way as Frame, and the format I am 'duping' has side-heads, I had the choice of css-left-margining every style except the headings, or giving the 2 heading styles that extend left into the 2-inch side head a negative left margin.

I chose to make 2 styles funky instead of 25 or so. (Before I can consider this part of the project finished, I have to modify all of the Frame table formats for Notes and Cautions, etc. that extend into the side head, because right now they are all truncated go off the page to the right in the PDF.

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Late breaking Arrrgh:
(As Scooby-Do says "Rought-Ro" - that won't work because Table stylesheets don't support a negative left margin. I need to rethink this part some. I don't want to kludge something. I hate side-heads. Did I mention that? If I can, I will liquidate them, or just not do the tables that way.)
Un-Arrrgh: I take it back. I defined a table sub-class in template.css with a -1 inch left margin and it worked perfectly. So I needed a table stylesheet and a table subclass to make it work. See the snapshot below.

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This is again, a result of the fact that I did the page layout with all text in the main text frame.) Here is a snap that shows enough of the idea.

I did some tuning of the headers and footers, because I am making one thing different in these templates. We are proposing to go with consecutive page numbering rather than chapter page numbering, so I wanted to make sure I could build it in Flare as well as retrofit it for Frame.

To get the look we wanted, we needed to place 3 elements in the footer at appropriate spacing:
- Page number
- Chapter number
- Book Title
to do this I ended up putting the page number in a text decoration frame flush left (or right on the right-hand page) and a footer frame with a 2 column table for Chapter (left) and Book Title (right) and vice versa on right-hand pages. I could not find any other way to have 3 elements correctly justified. I added a second text deco frame, but nothing showed up in it, nor did a second footer frame do the trick (I posted in the Flare Forum about this).

Here is a snap of the result.


All in all this day went pretty well.

Tomorrow I have to get back to some regular old projects, and I am going to run some comparison tests running Flare on a faster machine to check CPU amd memory utilization. My 512mb machine is getting kinda pegged out running Frame, Flare, and Outlook plus other junk simultaneously.