I've barely made the required Creative Suite 4 verbal transition from palettes to panels. Now FrameMaker has incorporated the CS4 panel terminology and then added the term "pods." What's it all about, Alphie?
Let's start with Panels. Panels are the floating, uh, panels that appear on the right side of the various FrameMaker 9 workspaces. They include the indispensable Paragraph and Character catalogs, but also include the various Designers (Paragraph, Character and Table), along with Find/Change, History and more.
Pods are defined by Adobe as "frequently used dialog boxes that have an interface designed to simplify your work, [and includes the] Conditional text pod, Cross-references pod, Marker pod, Fonts pod, Insets pod, [and the] Variables pod."
Here's my definition: panels appear on the right, pods at the bottom. (This is slightly oversimplified, because Pods in the structured environment have additional properties that I won't get into here.) Don't get me started on the Window > Panels menu option that then proceeds to list the pods.
OK, so now we have pods and panels. How do we manage them? I always advise my FrameMaker students with small screens to leave class, drive straight to a store like Best Buy and purchase the largest possible monitor they can afford. All of the current Adobe programs offer a plethora of panels and we need space to store them all. Can't buy a new monitor? How about hooking a second monitor to your XP or Vista system? Then you can push all the panels to the second monitor and do all your layout on your primary display. No? Then, keep reading.
- Open or close any panel or pod by clicking its name via Window > Panels
- Rearrange open panels and pods by dragging the panel/pod name
- Click the gray space to the right of any panel/pod name to collapse/expand an open panel group
- Click the double white arrows to the right of panel's name to collapse/expand a panel group to icons with labels (not pods)
- After collapsing the panel groups to icons with labels, resize the panels to just icons by tugging on the left edge of the panel group (again, not pods).
The best part? Once you get your panels and pods (and toolbars) just the way you like them, you can click on the Workspace Switcher in the Application bar and save your workspace. That way, you can return to your customized, saved workspace at any time. This is a huge improvement over the old FrameMaker interface.