Archive Plugin

Registration fee: $25

To request a trial version, send email to bruce.foster@comcast.net.

Description

Archive is a shareware plugin for FrameMaker that copies a book to an archive directory and gathers all documents, referenced graphics, and text insets for that book into the archive directory. All references in the archived book are relative and point to documents, graphics, and text insets under the archive directory. Archive does not change references to documents that are not part of the book, and these references can be absolute.

Once a book has been archived, you can zip the archive directory to create a compressed archive of your book. You can also use this Archive plugin to create a self-contained book, making it easy to move the book and all necessary files to a new location without breaking references.

Archive will also archive a single document and its referenced objects.

If your documents reference two or more graphic files that have the same filename but reside in different source directories, Archive will rename the files when placing them into the archve. Each file with a duplicate name added to the archive will be renamed from filename.xxx to filenameNNN.xxx. Documents with identical filenames but different pathnames and text insets with identical filenames but different pathnames are treated similarly.

Limitations

Archive does not archive OLE objects included in documents.

Usage

1. Save and close any documents you have open.

2. Open the book or document you want to archive.

3. Choose the menu command:

File > Utilities > Archive Book (if a book file is active)

File > Utilities > Archive Document (if a document file is active)

3. In the Browse for Folder dialog, open your archive directory. In the directory you choose, the Archive plugin will create a subdirectory to hold the archived book or document. The subdirectory will have the same name as the book or document file, without any extension. Within the subdirectory, two subdirectories will be created, one for referenced graphics and one for text insets.

4. Click OK to start the archiving process.

As each file is archived, the file name appears in the status line of the book window.

At the end of the archiving process, the original book or document file is closed, and the archived book or document file is open in the FrameMaker session. If problems were encountered during the archiving process, a message box notifies you and refers you to a log file for more information.

Installation

1. Copy both files, the .txt and .dll, to your maker\fminit\plugins directory.

2. When you restart FrameMaker, the new menu commands are available.

Customization

You can customize the Archive plugin by editing the archive.ini file. This file is created the first time you run the Archive plugin, and the file resides in directory where the plugin is installed: maker\fminit\plugins.

You can change the names of the subdirectories for referenced graphics and text insets by editing these lines in the archive.ini file:

GraphicsDir=Graphics InsetsDir=Text

If you delete the values for either GraphicsDir or InsetsDir, Archive does not create the subdirectory and puts the referenced files in the same directory as the book and document files.

If you don't want to archive text insets, set the InsetsDir as follows:

InsetsDir=§

where § is Alt+0167. That tells Archive to not archive text insets and to not update any references for text insets.

If you don't want Archive to strip the file suffix when creating the archive directory name from the book (document) name, change the value from "True" to "False" on following line in [Book] ([Document]) section of archive.ini:

StripSuffix=True

Compatibility

Archive works with FrameMaker 7.0 through 9.0 on Windows. If you use Unicode in filenames, please contact me before ordering.