Adobe FrameMaker: Better, Faster= Longer Lunches

I'm midway through an annual FrameMaker production job. It's a great opportunity for me to get out of the classroom and into the same trenches that you climb into every day.

First of all, let me say that I'm impressed with Frame 9. It is as stable as it used to be years ago (yes, FrameMaker 8, I'm talking to you).  A full week with equations, large tables and lots of figures-and no tears. Woo Hoo!

As I'm working, I'm thinking about things that I do to make my production work go faster. Here are a few of my favorite tips:

• Go to your computer's Control Panel and open the Mouse controls. On the Pointer Options tab, select Automatically move pointer to the default button in a dialog Box and click OK.

  

  FrameMaker's dialog boxes pop up all over the place. This one little checkbox will save your wrist the extra movement to reach the OK button.

• Rapidly pull out all those extra hard returns: Find: \p|\p, Change to: \p and turn Use WildCards on.
• Use keyboard shortcuts. Tables are one place where I slow down in production. I particularly like these (remember that all Escape key shortcuts are sequential-you can execute them with one finger):
  • Esc ti (Insert a table)
  • Esc ta 1 t Enter (Add a header row)
  • Ecs tl (straddle selected table cells)
  • Esc tw (shrinkwrap cells to selected cells contents)

My FrameMaker students will all recognize this sentiment, which I drill into them during class: when you can shave seconds here and there from your workflow, those seconds will eventually grow into minutes and hours. And for the longest jobs, the time you save can mean the difference between a free weekend, and one spent in front of the computer, trying to make deadline.

Need some more help with FrameMaker? We've got an online Adobe FrameMaker 9 Introduction class coming up October 22-23, 2009. Sign up today. Looking for advanced FrameMaker training? Click here to our upcoming Adobe FrameMaker 9 Advanced dates. Looking for other online classes? Click here.