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As Fred and Richard have already pointed out, Frame won't create working
cross-references in text insets when you create a PDF. That's a
FrameMaker bug that may or may not ever get fixed.
In my TechPubs department, we came up with a couple of solutions:
1. Break down your content into small enough chunks that each chunk can
be linked into a book without having to be a text inset. I broke my
content apart into separate files by level 1 heading (very rarely by
level 2) rather than by chapter because some of my manuals use all of
those topics and some don't. If a particular manual doesn't use a topic,
I simply leave it out of the book file. By doing this, I eliminated the
need for text insets altogether. This method also can cut down on the
amount of conditional text that you may need to use, which is an added
bonus. Your book file will get longer because you'll have more files in
it, but you'll have more control over everything overall.
2. Use the $25 Archive plugin by Bruce Foster
(http://home.comcast.net/~bruce.foster/Archive.htm). Use this nifty
utility to create a stand-alone version of your manual, complete with
all graphics and text insets. In that stand-alone version, you can
manipulate things to your heart's content to get the PDF to work
(including converting all of the text insets to text), and it won't
affect your source files. In our work environment, where we're required
to save the files used to create a final PDF, we simply zip up the
archive, and we're done.
Hope that helps,
Donna
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