Re: Problems with developing a plugin

Subject: Re: Problems with developing a plugin
From: Chris Despopoulos <cud -at- telecable -dot- es>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Sat, 29 May 2004 19:30:58 -0700


(This is a unique first line so the list won't kick the message out. I previously sent this message with a bad subject line...

BTW - you should go to the FrameUSers list to continue this line of discussion - I believe this list should not be so tools-specific.)

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It seems to me you are overcomplicating the problem. Either that, or you really want to create unconnected pages, one at a time. Anyway, a few things to know:

It's true that FrameMaker tables have required structure. In FrameMaker a table is really a managed collection of many text frames - all the features like resizing and shading adn drawing lines between cells are conceptually macro - like procedures that perform actiopns on the collection of text frames that we call a table. This is entirely different from tables in a product like Word or WordPerfect, where the tables are collections managed paragraphs with tabs and other control characters in them. It means that you cannot simply select a range of paragraphs, copy/paste, and then have a subset of a table in your new document.

What you can do is get a list of all the rows that are on a page, select the rows, copy/paste them, etc. And then you can also use the same table format, adn you can copy/paste the heading rows, and copy/paste the title content. By doing all these things, you can recreate a table that is a subset of an existing table.

If you only want a page, then you will have problems if you copy the entire contents of a frame - you may be mixing that up with copying all the contents of a flow. You have to be careful to get the contents between the first pgd and the last pgf in the frame. But that's also problematic - the first pgf in the frame may begin on the previous page, or the last pgf may end on the following page. You may have a table that is anchored on a previous page. Or you may have a table anchored on the current page, but actually begins on the following page - if you get the last pgf on the page, then you will also get this table anchor as it's content, and then have more than one page worth of stuff. So the point is, this is not a trivial problem.

I happen to be in the middle of a problem that deals with one page at a time. I'm dealing with it by line breaks - I use F_ApiGetText to get FTI_LineBegin units. Then I check whether I have any table or frame anchors in that line.

I wonder what your goal is here. Does it really have to be one page at a time? Are you generating changed pages? Maybe you would want to generate PDF of those pages... I mean, assume you get these subsets of text. Are you accounting for autonumbering? All that will change as soon as you take your text out of the main document.

A rule of thumb - if you want to do something via the FDK, try to do it via the user interface first. Then figure out how to reproduce those actions in the FDK.
I hope this helps...

I'm developing a plugin for Framemaker that, basically, compares two
documents that are similar (they're automatically produced from a database
source) and generates a new document which is made up of only the page
that have some changes. The part that does the comparison seems to work
fine, but I've some problems with the part that have to create the new
document.

In particular, the solution I'm trying to make the plugin doing the
following actions:

1) Creation of a new body page;

2) Assignation to the body page of the corresponding master page;

3) Cancel text frames that are in the page created;

4) creation of the text frames that are in the page I've to copy and
assignation of their attributes;

5) copy of the text of every text frame (with an operation of cut and
paste of the entire contents)

6) link text frames in the correct sequence as text flow





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