Re: New to FrameMaker

["Edgar D' Souza" <edgar -dot- b -dot- dsouza -at- gmail -dot- com>]

On 6/16/07, quills -at- airmail -dot- net <quills -at- airmail -dot- net> wrote:
>
> At 4:21 PM -0400 6/15/07, Brierley, Sean wrote:
> >Perhaps the Autotext plugin can take care of this?
>
> I have used this plug-in, and it functions flawlessly. The only way
> it could be better if it were free. But for around $10, it's more
> than worth it. You can even assign a key combination to invoke it.
> how painless is that?
>


AutoHotkey (autohotkey.com) is free. I use it a lot with Frame, while
editing (I mark up files sent to me with comments, and the writers apply the
comments to their source files, in order to avoid font issues and other
little annoyances). I've set up several macro definitions - for example, if
I type ".(" (period and open parens) in my Frame doc, AutoHotkey backspaces
over the two chars I typed, and replaces it with "Always end a sentence with
a period." The macro sends the F8 keystroke before this, to apply a
character style called EditComment, so my comment is automatically formatted
to stand out from the surrounding text, too. It speeds me up a whole lot!
:-)
Getting back to the current issue, it should be easy to set up an AutoHotkey
macro to substitute "->" with the proper character(s) and even to apply a
character format to those characters, if desired. This removes the need to
memorize arcane keystroke sequences for special characters...

Oh, and I also set it up so that all the macros I defined are only active if
the currently active window is a FrameMaker window, so these macros don't
interfere with other programs. The only issue I have is that once in a while
Frame can't keep up with the stream of incoming characters from AutoHotkey,
and doesn't do the job properly. In these cases, a quick Ctrl+Z and
re-invocation of the macro usually fixes it.

AutoHotkey has a huge lot more features, and some sample scripts as well,
besides a few sites on the web that share AHK scripts. Investing a little
time investigating this utility can return rich rewards in terms of time
saved.

And no, I am in no way affiliated with that company or product, except as a
happy user of AHK.

HTH,
Ed.
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