Change Bars Won't Disappear!

[andrew...@adobeforums.com]

I'm using Frame 6.0 on Windows 2K and am having problems making change bars disappear. I've tried the Format > Style > Change Bars (twice) method, I've tried the character designer method, I've tried the Format > Characters > Default Paragraph Font method and none of them are working.

Any and all help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Andy

[Sheila_...@adobeforums.com]

Andrew, I don't use Change Bars at all, but if nobody can suggest an alternative ... you might try saving the file as MIF, then opening it again in FM. Sometimes that cleans out "artifacts" from the little grey cells. If all is well, save it again as a proper .fm binary file.

Another thing to do might be to look at the MIF with MIFBrowser, a freebie tool from Graham Wideman at <http://wideman-one.com>

You might can probably find the offending change bar commands in there and delete them by editing the MIF file in a text editor.

I seem to recall other postings about evil changebars ... what version of FM6 are you using? have you applied the patches that are available?

Sheila

[Robert_B...@adobeforums.com]

I'm not sure what you mean by disappear,i.e., delete all change bars or keep them in the documenet but hide them. In any event, have you tried Format>Document> Clear All Change Bars. This gets rid of them for me in FM6.

rob.calm

[andrew...@adobeforums.com]

Thanks to Sheila and Robert for their replies, but my problem was even wackier than I thought. When I applied a change to my document I was having change bars spring up in unassociated areas; change bars that I was then unable to (selectively) remove by any method.

I think I have resolved the problem, however, by deleting the conditional text tags that were in the document (even making them unconditional didn't work). As this file was originally a Word document that was brought into Frame, I'm assuming that these tags were some sort of artifact from the Track Changes feature in Word.

Thought I'd post my resolution so that it will hopefully help someone else down the road facing the same predicament.

[Thomas_...@adobeforums.com]

If you're talking about clearing *ALL* change bars in a document,
and the Format>Document>ChangeBars dialog doesn't seem to be
working, the only possible cause that I've heard of is if your
contents was imported from Word documents. In that case,
apparently "revision tracking" (or whatever it's called) can
turn into change bars that won't go away. If I remember
correctly, you need to "accept all changes" in Word before
you import the text to FM. Otherwise you may need to go
the MIF route, or re-tag everything from scratch.

--
/Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
Technical Communicator, Uppsala, Sweden
http://go.to/framers/

[Sheila_...@adobeforums.com]

Ah, yesssss, the insidiousness of Track Changes is once again revealed. Thanks for posting your solution, Andrew.

That's another reason that when whacky things like this happen that looking into the MIF file with MIFBrowser can be quite a revelation. I've seen artifacts from Word that caused havoc and were =retained= after saving the FM file as MIF and then reopening it, which is "supposed" to remove anything that's not legal MIF.

Sheila