Is there a way to create a popup comment in FrameMaker 10?

[kmrountree]

I would like to create "Comments" in FrameMaker that would display as a popup in the PDF output (similar to inserting Sticky Notes in Acrobat, but I want to insert it in the Frame source file). Is there a way to do this? Thanks.

[Arnis_Gubins]

If you use the "alert" hypertext marker, then this is translated to an Acrobat "Note" feature (defaulted to an icon & without a title in the PDF).

If this doesn't suffice, then you could use postscript text frames and enter the appropriate pdfmark commands to create a popup note in the PDF (this is extremely "under the hood" processing and you have to know about using postscript and the Acrobat pdfmark command set).

The easiest & recommended route would be to get Shlomo Perets' Timesavers tool with the Forms assistant (AutoPopup function) to allow you to create and maintain these within FM. See: http://www.microtype.com/timesavers_Assistants.html for more details.

[kmrountree]

Thanks, Arnis - the Timesavers tool looks like it can do some interesting stuff. I'll look into that some more 🙂

[kmrountree]

It looks like the Forms Assistant allows you to use Hypertext marker commands (such as "alert") to generate the PDF popups - is there more to it than this? That's what I gathered by looking at the sample PDFs and FrameMaker source files, but it's hard to know for sure. This would be an important factor in deciding whether to purchase, since I'm not very familiar with Postscript

[Arnis_Gubins]

I presume you looked at: http://www.microtype.com/showcase/FormAsst/SP_RolloverPop_demo.pdf to see the various types of pop-up?

Most of the TimeSavers commands are inserted as markers within the FM document and are quite easy to maintain. There is some configuration for features/colours/linestyles/etc. in some initialization files, but these are mainly a set it & forget it type. The PDF creation process also uses a custom prologue and epilogue file during distilling

For more detailed responses to your questions and examples, you should contact Shlomo directly.

[kmrountree]

Thanks Arnis - I did look at this PDF and the source files, but I wasn't sure whether there was more to it than inserting Markers (and whether the commands were in fact specific to timesaver). So it was good to have confirmation. I emailed Shlomo to ask if he had any presentations or demos showing the process in full.

[Michael314]

Arnis,

I experimented with the Alert marker on a Frame 7.2 manual. It works very well except the "Alert with title" marker puts the title text in the body of the popup note. I used the syntax of

alerttitle Callouts:The callouts are explained below.

The word "Callouts" appeared in the popup box with the text so I had to manually move it to the title space. Is there some weird bug operating here or some arcane bit of syntax not mentioned in the help file?

The other properties like the shape of the icon and its color would be useful if they could be specified in the hypertext box in Framemaker rather than do it one at a time as a post-process in Acrobat. Is that possible in the latest version of Framemaker?

Yours,

Michael F

========

[Arnis_Gubins]

Michael,

No bug. That's the way it's always been - the hypertext & alert featues were in FM way before PDFs ever came upon the scene. An Alert with title, when converted to PDF, is converted to an untitled Note with the "title" text placed as a prefix to the note content.

That's one of the reasons why Shlomo's TimeSavers is highly recommeded for creating proper, controllable features in PDFs from FM.