Generating Change Bar Documents????

[Chris Mack]

I’m writing very large manuals. A reviewer may only change 5% of the manual. After making changes, I provide the reviewer with a new copy to approve. Rather than print or PDF the whole manual, I’d like to only give the reviewer the pages that changed. I identify those pages with change bars (i.e., Format | Document | Change Bars….). So here are my questions:

1. Is there a way only to print or PDF all pages that contain change bars without having to manually scroll through the manual and perform this task page-by-page?

2. If this cannot be done in Framemaker, can it be done in Acrobat?

3. If question #1 isn’t possible, then is there a way to use Find/Search to find change bars in order to reduce time to accomplish this task?

4. Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks,
Chris Mack
Documentation Project Manager
The Coca-Cola Company
Atlanta, GA.

[Robert B. Kelman]

« If question #1 isn’t possible, then is there a way to use Find/Search to find change bars in order to reduce time to accomplish this task?»

Off hand, I can’t answer your other questions, but here’s how to find the change bars.

Select some text that has change bars (doesn’t matter how much you select). Then open up the Find/Change dialog box and select Character Format from the Find Drop Down List. This should open up the Find Character Format Dialog Box. Choose As Is for everything in the left column that will let you do so. Then gray out all the boxes (this is important gray them, don’t leave them unchecked) except for the one that says Change Bars. Select that one.

Now you can find all the change bars independently of the characteristics of the underlying text.

Cheers,

RobKelman.calm
3 December 2002 13:09 MDT (-6 UMT)

[Thomas Michanek]

1. Nope. (unless you write a FrameScript or similar)
2. Nope.
3. What Robert said, but you can use Shift+F8 to set all things
to "AS is" in the dialog.
4. Use Word. NOT. :-)

--
/Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
http://go.to/framers/

[Bill Dauphin]

I'm not sure why you don't want to PDF the whole manual: Is there something about the way the book is set up that makes distilling a PDF more difficult than usual?

Anyway, even though there's no obvious way to *automatically* print only the pages with change bars, once you've got a PDF, you can fairly quickly extract them into a separate file to print: Within Acrobat, go to the first page with change bars, extract it, and save the extracted page with a new filename. Now with both files open (hope you have a big monitor <g>) and thumbnails displayed, you can quickly page through the big doc, dragging the change bar pages to the new file as you find them. When you're done, close the original file *WITHOUT SAVING CHANGES* and print the new file, which has nothing but the change pages.

Far from perfect, I realize... but it's the quickest/simplest way I can think of to accomplish what you're after.

-Bill

[Bill Swallow]

1. No.
2. No.
3. Use conditional text to mark the altered sections as "for review" and format the conditional text format to use change bars. Then search on the condition name. When "for review" items are finalized, set them back to unconditional.
4. See 3.

[William Lugg]

So if you set all changed text to have a "for review" conditional tag, doesn't FrameMaker offer the capability to control the display of text tagged in a certain way?

I'm thinking that a somewhat cumbersome approach may be to mark all text on a page with change bars as "For Review" and then display only text with that tag. Then you could do the PDF on that alone.

Bill Lugg
willia...@cisf.af.mil

[Everett Rubel]

Chris,

Create a PDF with change bars and also another without change bars, but identical in every other way.

Open both PDF files in Acrobat 5. Move focus to the file without changebars and then select the Tools > Compare > Two Documents menu item. In the Compare Documents dialog box, the file sans change bars should be in the upper file select field, and the one with change bars in the lower field. For the type of comparison, go with Page by page visual differences, low sensitivity.

You will get a PDF file with two extraneous pages, then on page 3 the first page that differs between the files, without change bars. Page 4 will be the same page with the change bars. You get one page from each file for each page with a change bar. Save this file as something like test.pdf.

You will probably have extraneous comments all over the test.pdf file. Remove these with the Tools > PDF Consultant > Detect and Remove menu item. Just remove all comments. To get your print-out, print from Acrobat, using the Print Even Pages only option in the Print dialog.

[Chris Mack]

You all offered some very good suggestions and I do appreciate your help! I’ll enter this information into the Framemaker option/feature request area. Maybe Adobe will consider adding this option/feature to make it simple for those of us who are developing huge documents.

Bill D….. Thank you for your suggestion on moving Change Bars pages into a PDF file. Another option would be to Save the original file and delete unwanted pages….same result.
Everett…. Thank you for your suggestion on using the compare feature in Acrobat 5.0. I haven’t tried that before. I will give it a try.

Robert…. Thank you for letting me know how to use the Find/Change dialog box to find Change Bars. This is very helpful.
Thomas…. Thank you for the Shift+F8 shortcut. That makes it easier to configure the Find/Change dialog box.

Bill S….. Thank you for suggesting the use of Conditional Text. Now that’s thinking outside of the box.
I came-up with a little twist to your suggestion. I think it could solve my first question if I made all text in my manual Conditional first. For example, if I applied a Conditional tag to all text call “Final Draft” then as I made changes, I could apply a Conditional Tag called “Change Bars” only to the text that changed. I could then instruct Framemaker to “Hide” “Final Draft” and “Show” “Change Bars.” This would only show text that had been changed, which would allow me to generate a PDF file of only the changed text. What do you think?

BTW, I think this answers William’s question, “doesn’t Framemaker offer the capability to control the display of text tagged in a certain way?

Thanks,
Chris Mack

[William Lugg]

I thought about your suggestion when I made my recommendation, but the problem is that the paging won't match that of the final document. You'd have to evaluate the significance of this.

Bill Lugg
willia...@cisf.af.mil

[Bill Swallow]

You don't want to overlap conditions... trust me. Make the document unconditional, and apply the change bars condition to the items that have changed.

[Rebecca Officer]

Be nice if FrameMaker let you display only text tagged with a certain condition and not display all the unconditional text as well. And Bill's right - you *really don't* want to overlap conditions like this.

Cheers, Rebecca

[Barbara Szczesniak]

I guess the answer would then be to make the whole document conditional, then make the changed sections unconditional. (Easy to find them now that we know how to do a find for change bars.) Of course, you still lose the pagination this way.

So we want to find each changed page, print the single page to PS for distilling, then append the PDFs into one file.

I know nothing about making scripts or macros for Frame, but, since you can do a Find for change bars, maybe you could set up some sort of script to do the find and print portions. If you make sure the PS files go to a Watched Folder, the PDFs will be auto-generated. Then, you only have to append manually (unless someone knows of a flashy way to do this.)

[William Lugg]

Is there any way to append PDFs to one another without the full version of Acrobat?

Bill Lugg

[Bill Swallow]

Yes, e-glue. *LOL*

I'm sure there is some open source utility out there, but you probably won't get results as good as from Acrobat.

[Chris Despopoulos]

Coming in late, but there is a way to make a utility for this problem via the FDK. For any page with changebars on it, you print the page as PostScript. Then you distill al the pages - Distiller comes with a utility to glom a series of PS files into a single PDF file. This would preserve the pagination, BTW.

And if you have Maker, then you have distiller. So there is a way to glue PDF pages together - well, actually you have to glue PS pages together. On Win, look in your Distiller Xtras folder for RUNDIREX.TXT. It's a gem.