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Images for multi-color bullets in FM9?

Explorer ,
Jun 15, 2010 Jun 15, 2010

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My team's FrameMaker template set currently has several Paragraph styles with custom bullets defined with autonumber formats that use characters from Wingdings, Webdings, and other symbol fonts. We'd like to use images for the bullet characters instead, giving us bullets with multiple colors, shading, and depth, like the images we use for bullets in our online help.

Does anyone know of a way to set up an image as a bullet in FrameMaker without having to manually create an inline anchored frame with an image each time we want a paragraph with one of these bullets?

We're using TCS 2.0 with FrameMaker 9.0 p250 on Windows XP SP3.

Thanks,

Alan

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Advocate ,
Jun 15, 2010 Jun 15, 2010

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Alan,

FrameMaker allows one or more characters of the paragraphs font or by using a character format by any other character formatting. Therefore it is possible to create a colored symbol, but only a single color. Also in general, characters are opaque objects, so you can build multicolor symbols from several character, positioned on top of each other (I have used that to create black/yellow warning signs), but shading and depth is clearly the domain of images.

- Michael

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LEGEND ,
Jun 15, 2010 Jun 15, 2010

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Alan,

If you don't have too many images that you want to use for the "bullet" symbols, then you could do this using two paratag styles and reference frames to hold the images.

Create one paratag (e.g. bullet_image) that uses the Frame Above referenced to the desired image in a reference frame on the Reference page (you'll need to play with the size and location of the image within the reference frame to get the margins correct) . Then on the Basic tab, set the Space Below to a negative value of the line spacing in the bulleted paratag, set the Line spacing to zero and set the Next Pgf Tag to be the one that you actually want to be the text entry (e.g. bullet_text).

In the actual bullet text paratag (e.g. bullet_text) adjust the left margins so that it doesn't overlap the "bullet" and set the Space Above to be the same negative spacing set in the previous paratag. You can optional set the Next Pgf Tag to be the bullet image (e.g. bullet_image), if you wish to keep adding bulleted items in a list.

What this does is move the text line (from the bullet_text tag) up and over top of the previous (bullet_image) paratag, so that it will appear that the image sits beside the text entry (acting as a bullet).

To use this, apply the bullet_image paratag, hit Enter and type in the text for the bullet_text tag, hit Enter twice (when the Next Pgf Tag is set to the bullet_image paratag) and keep going...

Moderately hard to set up, dead easy to use.

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Explorer ,
Jul 20, 2010 Jul 20, 2010

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Michael & Arnis: Thanks for the suggestions.

I am reluctant to implement the two paragraph tag solution because it would mean having to go into our multi-product doc set and add the extra line break between the bullet image's paragraph tag and the bullet's text paragraph tag for every occurrence of the existing bullet paragraph tag. I will keep this idea in mind the next time I create a new template.

I think the overlapping opaque characters might get me closer to what I  need with minimal rework to our existing doc set.

- Alan

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Explorer ,
Aug 24, 2011 Aug 24, 2011

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Arnis,

Thank you so much for this post! It's just what the doctor ordered. (Literally--I'm writing a medical manual.)

Thanks!

Karen

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Community Expert ,
Aug 24, 2011 Aug 24, 2011

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Where an iconic character (like the default bullet) will do, and only color variation is needed, the standard formatting tools suffice, as long as you don't mind some clutter in the catalogs.

For example, if you want a black-text bulleted format to have a red bullet:

  • <define color - in this case Red already exists>
  • Create a Character Format named "Red" that is As-Is for everything except Color: Red
  • Create a Paragraph Format named: Bulleted.Red that has...
  • Autonumber property of standard \b\t\, but
  • Character Format: Red

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