Copying chapters within same book causes duplicate markers

[wobering]

When copying chapters within the same book, the newly created copy caries with it the memory of all the previously created markers defined within it.  Frame seems to be ok with keeping track of this, but the problem I have is when I convert the book to a MS help file using Robohelp.  All those duplicate markers cause Robohelp to create links to the wrong locations.

I there anyway to get Frame to correctly update the text within the markers (and their associated links) when copying (or even just adding) chapters to a book?  The book I am working with has 64 chapters in it, and it is a real waste of time to have to go in and manually change hundreds of markers and cross-references when making changes/additions to the chapters.

Thank you.

[Matt S - Tech Comm Tools]

Why do you need new copies of the same content?

[wobering]

Some of the chapters have very similar content, so I just made a duplicate of one, and then changed the parts I needed.  thought it would save a lot of typing, but it cost me much more time to correct what happens as a result.  Each of these chapters can have dozens of links to things like figure numbers.  As an example, if I copy chapter 1 over to create a chapter 2, then chapter 2 will have markers with figure number references like 1-1, 1-2, and so on.  Unfortunately, chapter 1 still does as well.  Framemaker seems to be able to track this with no issues.  However, when these markers are gathered and processed by Robohelp, they show up as duplicates, and the S/W selects the last one in the list.  This causes some links to go to locations you don't want them to.  The more copies that are made, the worse it gets.

The other issue is when you insert or move chapters within a book.  The chapter, table and figure numbers are all adjusted to their new values, but the original text used by Framemaker to create the markers in the first place stay the same.  So if I insert a chapter ahead of an existing chapter (say I insert a new chapter 4 ahead of what was chapter 4 which now becomes 5), the text within the markers for both chapters 4 and 5 will now potentially have the same vaules.  This is another way to get to the same problem as discussed in the first paragraph.

I need a way to have the entire book recreate all the text used to generate the markers, and then update the existing cross-references to now use the updated markers.  That would basically keep everything sync'd no matter what you do.

Is this possible?

[Matt S - Tech Comm Tools]

I don't know if you'll find an easy way out of what you've done so far, but I'd suggest creating unique content with unique markers and then making use of Fm's text reuse features like variables, text insets, and cross-references.

Beyond those features, you can also consider a content management system, which will also assist in these issues.

If each piece of content is used, managed, and referenced in a unique way, you will most likely avoid all the issues you're facing now.

[wobering]

I expected something like that would work, but was hoping to avoid going back through all 65 chapters to add uniqueness to the names.  Since it's a S/W User Manual, some of the figure titles are repeated in almost every chapter.  Titles such as "Example of Main Window" would now need to become "Example of <application X's> Main Window".

I was expecting an application as powerful as Framemaker would have a utility that could unscrew something of this nature since it seems like a simple marker text update followed by a cross-reference update against the new marker text.  I guess since each marker's text is one long aggregate of multiple values, it's not an easy thing to do.

Thanks for your help. 

[Matt S - Tech Comm Tools]

Hope it helped...

You can set the Find/Change to search the marker text, ensuring the uniqueness of each marker, but I don't see a way of automating the process. I'd check with Rick Quatro and Scott Prentice to see if they might script your way out of this rabbit hole.

[Diana Swenk]

Open the duplicate file, search for markers of a specific marker type (whatever they are), and replace with nothing. It deletes all the markers of that type within the file.

[wobering]

Thanks for your response.  Unfortunately, I don't want to delete the markers, just refresh them to now represent the new book order, as well as sync the cross-references that use them.  Take a look at my reply to mattrsullivan to get a better idea of how I get into this state.  I can't believe I'm the only one to have run into this issue, so I'm assuming there is a way to clean this up.  I'm probably just not phrasing the question correctly.