Re: techwr-l digest: May 28, 2004

[Chris Despopoulos <cud -at- telecable -dot- es>]

It seems to me you are overcomplicating the problem.  Either that, or 
you reall 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...