Re: Adobe's lousy AppleScript implementations
Re: Adobe's lousy AppleScript implementations
- Subject: Re: Adobe's lousy AppleScript implementations
- From: Bill Briggs <email@hidden>
- Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 09:30:58 -0300
At 1:36 PM -0400 26/09/02, David Crowe wrote:
Another little wrinkle is that window 1 appears to always be the
topmost window (and this goes for pdf window), but documents are
numbered iin the order they show up in the FrameMaker Window menu.
One of the flaws in FrameMaker's AppleScript implementation was that
many objects were indexed in the order they were put in the document,
not in the order they are arranged in the document, as one would
expect. Imagine what it would be like if you had such a condition
with paragraphs - jumbled para numbers. Total disaster. It was
supposed to be fixed, but tables are still yielding index numbers
that indicate the order is the creation order, not the placement
order. And there are rather nasty container/parentage issues with
objects that make it tedious to figure out what you need to do to get
some FrameMaker scripts to work at all.
For example, you can get the count of tables in a document, and you
can get the count of tables in a paragraph, but you can't get the
count of tables in a text flow, even though the containment hierarchy
is document->text flow-->paragraph (though even that isn't clear from
the dictionary). But typically it's a text flow that is the container
of interest. If you try to get the index of the tables in a
paragraph, you get an error, yet you can get the index of tables in a
document. Given that there are tables on the Reference pages that you
don't want to bother with, this is an annoyance.
The fact that "window" has an index, but not a name, makes it
difficult to even know what window you're working with. Document
order is in the order they were opened. It's all rather ugly. I've
been trying to get some of this stuff fixed, but AppleScript is low
on the priority list for FrameMaker.
Any hints as to how to simplify this would be appreciated. If
someone has FrameMaker 7 it would be nice to know if the same
(mis-)behaviour occurs with that version.
The index ordering for objects like tables and such was supposed to
have been fixed in this version, but it appears that there remain
some rather nasty surprises. Sigh.
Frame is a great tool and I know of nothing I'd ever use in its
stead, but it's still got a lot of quirks that make scripting it a
real headache at times.
- web
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