Internal Searching, Or I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
As technical writers, we often need to search for items to change or remove. There are really two kinds of searching: internal, meaning searching for something within a document; and external, meaning searching for something within multiple documents. With internal searching, we are trying to find the locations of the specific instances of the search item. With external searching, we are trying to find out which files contain the search item. This article will talk about internal searching.
Searching within a Word document is straightforward. You bring up the Find and Replace box, enter your search items, and click Find Next. The Word search tool doesn't have some of the bells and whistles of other search utilities, but it gets the job done. If your document happens to consist of a master document with sub-documents, expand the sub-documents before you start your search.
In contrast to the ease of searching within Word documents, searching within FrameMaker documents can be downright painful. I'm not talking about simple documents where everything is in a single file (although that can have its challenges also: make sure all conditional text is visible). I'm talking about the far more usual case of a book or document file that has text insets. FrameMaker does NOT search in text insets, even if the text in question is visible on the screen. It only searches in the open document itself.
This means that we have to get creative if we want to search in FrameMaker documents. "Creative", in this case, means sneaky. We can't search for what we want in FrameMaker. Therefore, we need to change the FrameMaker file into something that we can search thoroughly. We have several choices, including PDF and HTML.
If we transform the FrameMaker document into a PDF, we can open it with Acrobat and perform searches within Acrobat. When we find what we're looking for, we must then refer back to the original FrameMaker document to make any changes. The Acrobat search utility is fairly limited and can't do many of the kinds of searches we would like. However, we can go one further step and save the PDF as a TXT or Word file, then use Word – or some other search utility – to find what we want.
Does that seem absurdly roundabout? Well, you're right: it is. But that's what you have to resort to if the maker of the product *cough* Adobe *cough* doesn't see fit to include search tools that actually work with its document architecture.
I can't say that I recommend transforming the original FrameMaker document into HTML, for two reasons. First, the process creates a GIF file for every figure in your document, which is annoying. Second, once you have the HTML file, you have to use the search function of your browser to do your searches, and these are typically very limited.
Bottom line: to do thorough internal searches on FrameMaker documents with text insets, you're going to have to bite the bullet and transform the document into at least PDF, and possibly TXT or Word format first.
Searching within a Word document is straightforward. You bring up the Find and Replace box, enter your search items, and click Find Next. The Word search tool doesn't have some of the bells and whistles of other search utilities, but it gets the job done. If your document happens to consist of a master document with sub-documents, expand the sub-documents before you start your search.
In contrast to the ease of searching within Word documents, searching within FrameMaker documents can be downright painful. I'm not talking about simple documents where everything is in a single file (although that can have its challenges also: make sure all conditional text is visible). I'm talking about the far more usual case of a book or document file that has text insets. FrameMaker does NOT search in text insets, even if the text in question is visible on the screen. It only searches in the open document itself.
This means that we have to get creative if we want to search in FrameMaker documents. "Creative", in this case, means sneaky. We can't search for what we want in FrameMaker. Therefore, we need to change the FrameMaker file into something that we can search thoroughly. We have several choices, including PDF and HTML.
If we transform the FrameMaker document into a PDF, we can open it with Acrobat and perform searches within Acrobat. When we find what we're looking for, we must then refer back to the original FrameMaker document to make any changes. The Acrobat search utility is fairly limited and can't do many of the kinds of searches we would like. However, we can go one further step and save the PDF as a TXT or Word file, then use Word – or some other search utility – to find what we want.
Does that seem absurdly roundabout? Well, you're right: it is. But that's what you have to resort to if the maker of the product *cough* Adobe *cough* doesn't see fit to include search tools that actually work with its document architecture.
I can't say that I recommend transforming the original FrameMaker document into HTML, for two reasons. First, the process creates a GIF file for every figure in your document, which is annoying. Second, once you have the HTML file, you have to use the search function of your browser to do your searches, and these are typically very limited.
Bottom line: to do thorough internal searches on FrameMaker documents with text insets, you're going to have to bite the bullet and transform the document into at least PDF, and possibly TXT or Word format first.
posted by Ed DeJesus at
7:28 AM
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