General Tips
Here are some general tips to enhance the use of FrameMaker....- FrameMaker by default allocates its colors from the root
window's (the screen background) colormap. This colormap is usually only
8-bit, 256 color cells. Many other programs also try to allocate colors from
this colormap rather than create their own custom colormaps in order to
conserve system resources. As such, the colors can run out very quickly
especially when FrameMaker has to display very colorful images.
Without enough colors for its own use, FrameMaker might be
forced to heavily dither images resulting in a less accurate color
representation. Therefore, it is best (on the Indigo and
Indigo2
at least) to tell FrameMaker to allocate its own private
colormap (256 colors all for itself) by inserting this line:
Maker.forcePrivateMap: True
into one's "~/.Xdefaults" file then restarting FrameMaker. Creating a private 8-bit colormap is, unfortunately, a bit of a problem on the Personal Irises since they only allow one 8-bit colormap to be installed at a time. On these machines it will be necessary to <Alt><left-click> on the FrameMaker titlebar to have its colormap installed rather than the root window's colormap. This will probably cause the colors in many of the other windows to be undesirably altered until their colormap is reinstalled with another <Alt><left-click> on one of their titlebars. On the Personal Irises, this same problem also plagues other programs which can create their own private 8-bit colormaps such as Ncview. In addition to 8-bit, FrameMaker can also run in 24-bit color by starting it with these options:
/usr/frame/bin/maker -vis truecolor -depth 24
One significant problem (with SGI FrameMaker 5 at least) is that while in this mode (as well as in an optional 12-bit color mode), imported EPS files are displayed as only black and white for some unknown reason. Imported bitmaps, however, do take advantage of the 24-bit color and look very nice.
- Another useful X resource for FrameMaker is:
Maker.dpi: 95x95
The default is 72dpi which isn't really appropriate for the large SGI monitor. This larger dpi will make a virtual inch in a FrameMaker document (when viewed at 100%) better approximate an real physical inch.
- It is probably best to import files into a FrameMaker
document by reference rather than copying them in directly. Copying them into
a document makes the document much larger and reduces flexibility if the
images have to be manipulated later. This is particularly true for documents
which have to be sent out for commercial printing. Also, if the autosave
feature is enabled then continually saving large documents can be quite time
consuming.
- There is a known conflict between using FrameMaker and
Xpsview
simultaneously. Follow the Xpsview link for more details on the
conflict. Therefore, it is probably better to use
Ghostview
or
MGv
instead. Note, MGv uses a private 8-bit colormap by default (a
problem on the Personal Irises, see above), but instructions for disabling this
can be found by following the link to the MGv page.
- When printing a document, FrameMaker tries to create a
temporary print file in the "/tmp" directory. If it cannot
create it there then the directory is used instead. If that
fails as well due to space limitations, then the document printing will be
either truncated or not printed at all. Therefore, it is useful to fool
FrameMaker into thinking that the directory is
elsewhere, such as on one's local disk which would have more space. This can
be done by starting FrameMaker as follows:
(xhost +; setenv HOME /net/ ; \ /usr/frame/bin/maker ) &
Note: The commands above should all be part of the same line.
Document Publishing
- Electronic Submission
- On-line
There are a few choices for making the contents of a FrameMaker document available for downloading to outside users. It can be presented in a web page as a link to a separate file or the contents can be shown directly within the web page itself.
The most obvious and probably least flexible choice is to just provide the original FrameMaker file plus referenced figures. Other people do not necessarily have to have FrameMaker in order to read its format since Adobe provides a free utility called FrameReader for several platforms. Note: FrameReader has been discontinued for the new FrameMaker 5.5, so the currently available one will only read documents up through version 5.1.1.
Another choice is to make a PostScript file from the document within FrameMaker. PostScript interpreters/viewers are available for many platforms (particularly Ghostscript), although they are probably not as widely used on the PC/Mac as in a UNIX environment. For maximum portability, the best choice for a distributable document is really PDF instead of PostScript. PDF can preserve the original document content just like PostScript, but has the advantages that it's stored as compressed binary for greatly reduced file sizes and supports hypertext capability. Adobe also provides an excellent free utility called Acroread to view PDF files on many platforms. The premiere program to create and edit PDF files (usually distilled from PostScript versions) is called Adobe Acrobat, but it's unfortunately not available for the SGI. The only apparent way to create PDF on the SGI is using a utility that comes with Ghostscript, invoked as such:
ps2pdf input.ps output.pdf
Rather than presenting the contents of a FrameMaker document as a link to a separate file, it is also possible and perhaps desirable to convert it all into HTML (as it's own web page) for easier viewing. As an example, the GFDL Annual Report starting with FY97/98 (GFDL & AOS Only) has been converted from a group of FrameMaker documents into HTML with a utility called maker2html. Lasted modified: Tuesday, 09-Jan-01 15:26:50 EST