RE: Long headings in FrameMaker

Subject: RE: Long headings in FrameMaker
From: David Cramer <dacramer -at- videon -dot- wave -dot- ca>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Sat, 27 Nov 1999 02:22:58 -0600

>>Hello, I am having a problem with several very long headings in my manual,
>>which make the TOC badly formatted
>>and run into two lines, instead of one. [...] I was hoping someone out
>there could
>>help, or I may have to chop these headings, somehow.
>
>I've had the same problem. The only solution I found was to introduce a
>forced line break (<shift>-<return>) either in the original heading or in
>the TOC.
>However, the latter way has the possible disadvantage of producing an extra
>page if there are many long headings...

Another variation, which provides slightly more flexibility, is to use hard
spaces between those words of the original heading that you want to be in
the second line of its generated instance in the TOC. The advantage to this
is that it may make it possible for the heading to break in the TOC,
without having it break on the original page.

And inserting *anything* in the TOC as opposed to on the original page is
usually more trouble than it's worth because each update of the TOC will
wipe out any of the inserted stuff.

Because the two-line entry in the TOC may still look clumsy, depending on
your overall layout, you might consider other alternative design solutions
instead, of course. In our situation, we decided in some cases to simply
use a smaller font size for the long headings. In other cases we also
introduced a little negative Spread in the headings' TOC paragraph
definition. If we had had a little more room on the page, we could also
have made the TOC text frame a little wider. And finally, as you suggest,
you could just chop/edit the headings.

Regards,

David

David Cramer, Process Innovation Evangelist 87-1313 Border Street
PBSC Computer Training Centres (an IBM company) Winnipeg MB R3H 0X4
Corporate Office Research & Development Canada






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