TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Excuse me for posting a FrameMaker query here, but whomever runs that list has it set so that my questions (as infrequent as they are) don't appear for sometimes several days. (Yet I've never posted anything inappropriate or outlandish.) Anyway . . .
We're running FrameMaker 11.0 on Windows 7 platforms and are having problems with one -- and ONLY one -- particular book.
The problem is that when adding the eight or so FM files to build this one particular book, FM recognizes most of the files as mif files and prompts me with a pop-up window advising me that the file . . .
"is not in recognizable format. Are you sure you want to add this file to (the book file)?"
The Add, Don't Add and Cancel buttons appear directly below, so I click "Add", and it take f-o-r-e-v-e-r but does finally load the book chapter.
In the book file, the accompanying icon is the letter "M" instead of "Fm" (like it usually is).
And this doesn't happen with all of the book chapters either, and is inconsistent with which chapters it "plays" with.
So what I do is open a so-called "mif" chapter in the book file, then do a "save-as" to "fm" format (which I know it already is), then delete the "mif" file from the book and re-import it as an "fm" file. Most of the time it works and the newly imported section displays and remains as "fm". But sometimes, even that doesn't work.
And if I do any edits in that chapter and save it again, the icon for that chapter might "miraculously" change to an "m" in the book window.
Sheesh!!
Note that in Windows Explorer, all of the files in their actual folder are honest-to-goodness FrameMaker files and not mif files.
So is this a bug in FM 11? We don't have this problem with any other FM files or books and have been successfully using FM for many years (myself, since 1998 with FM 5.5).
What gives?
-- Ken in Atlanta
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Doc-To-Help: The Quickest Way to Author and Publish Online Help, Policy & Procedure Guides, eBooks, and more using Microsoft Word | http://bit.ly/doctohelp2015
