Text skipping from right to left column

[Carsten86]

I have a problem where sometimes if I'm working on a document with two columns on the same page, if the left column is not filled to the bottom, text from the bottom of the right column skips to the left. Has anyone else had this problem?

The page may look correct in Framemaker, but on export to Postscript, it happens, and sometimes it can be incredibly hard to notice before sending the file to the client.

Hope someone can shed some light on this

[Winfried Reng]

Hi Carstens,

Yes. I also have this problem from time to time.

I noticed this with FrameMaker 10 and now also with FrameMaker 11. Extremely annoying.

How can you rely on that the text is where it is supposed to be with such a bug.

MIF washing fixes this issue. However, not for long ...

Or deactivate the setting „Balance Columns“ in your main text frame.

Best regards

Winfried

[Carsten86]

Thank you!

What do you do in MIF to prevent it from happening? Does it come back if you do changes in FrameMaker?

Deactivating Balance Columns, does that fix the problem permanently? I think that's what we need to do then

Thank you!

[Winfried Reng]

MIF washing just moves the text back into the second column. This is not a permanent fix.

I do not know when the text from the end of the second column jumps to the end of the first column again (updating the book, editing the file ...).

As far as I remember deactivating Balance Columns fixes this issue permanently.

Please test it and report here, whether that helped.

[Bob_Niland]

> The page may look correct in Framemaker, but on export to Postscript, ...

What platform & FM version?

I'm going to guess Windows.

What printer driver is configured during edit?

What printer driver is configured at Print-to-Ps?

If the "printer" changse, text flow layout can easily change.

Also if font download options change, my guess is there's some risk of flow layout changing.

[Winfried Reng]

I do not know about Carstens' setup. I have Windowns 7, 32 bit, FrameMaker 11.0.2.384 (although I experienced this also with FrameMaker 10).

I have Sundorne's SetPrint utility installed to set the Adobe PDF printer as the default printer.

The problem might not be explained clearly. However, as I noticed it as well, I know what happens.

Main text frame with two-column-layout. Balance Columns is activated.

Then it happens again and again that some lines from the end of the second column are moved to the end of the first column. This is clearly a bug. There aren't any font or printer changes involved.

[FieryPantone]

I'll heroically reveal a mistake I made that's in this area … I was moving a document from a one-column + sidehead layout to a two-column, and couldn't work out why the body text was neatly spread between both columns instead of flowing to fill first the left and then the right. I tracked down "Balance columns" and turned it off without achieving anything: then noticed I had some headings (defined for the original layout) set to "across all columns and sideheads". D'oh!

[Bob_Niland]

> ... lines from the end of the second column ...

I missed that bit in the basenote. That's indeed not a "normal" font-metrics-jitter reflow.

> "across all columns and sideheads"

Text from the flow at the end of the second column that is tagged as AAC&SH or just ACC will do this (that's the expected behavior). If the text is a smal sentence that is not more than one column in width, the ACC nature of it won't be obvious.

So if tailing text from col2 is sliding back to col1,
Paragraph Designer > Pagination > Format
needs to be inspected to see if an ACC option has gotten turned on. I would also check
Basic > Indents,
because that also can cause bizarre layout behavior, esp. for indents that exceed column width.

Once those are ruled out, I'd concur that this is a bug. I've never seen it in FM7x, by the way.

[Winfried Reng]

In my case (and probably also in Carsten's) the paragraphs involved are set to run "In Column".

Not "Side Head-Alignment". Not "Across All Columns". Not "Across All Columns and Side Heads".

Also no indents.

Niels' issue is a different one.

[Carsten86]

Yep, it's not an issue with Acros All Columns. The problem is that while working on the text, it looks like it should, with the correct text in the correct column, but on output it sometimes happens that one or two lines from the right column is moved to the left column (never the other way around).

[Carsten86]

I'm on a Windows 7 running on a VMWare on an iMac with FrameMaker 11.0.2.384.

Sorry about the poor description, but Winfried is right, it is not the regular re-flow problem that would happen with different printer drivers and fonts. It's a very strange and annoying bug because it can be incredibly hard for anyone, and especially the designer to catch.

Hopefully the balanced columns trick will work, but I can't test it properly right now. I'll let you know if it works though