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Adobe FrameMaker: List of markers
by Barb Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor on FrameMaker
Updated: May 23, 2020
One of my regular layout jobs has contributing authors who use a variety of accented characters in their writing. The chapter titles are set in all caps, and don’t need the accents, but the table of contents is set in upper & lower case, and does. How do I reconcile that issue? I create custom markers.
Here’s what I do:
- Select the chapter title.
- Open Insert menu > Marker (Esc sm).
- Pick the Edit button from the Marker Type list, and add a short, descriptive name like TOC Title and click Add.
- Edit the Marker text to match what I want in the Table of Contents and click the New Marker button.
- I repeat the process for the byline as well.
- As I layout each additional chapter in my publication, I add the TOC Title and TOC Byline markers to each file.
When I’m ready to generate a Table of Contents, I don’t! I create a List of Markers (LOM), instead.
- In the book window, I choose Insert > List of > Markers.
- Double click the custom marker(s) from the Don’t Include list to scoot it over to the Include Markers of Type list.
- Everything else is exactly like creating a generated TOC, but the suffix will be LOM (list of markers).
Pretty cool. I use this whenever I need to modify the TOC entries from the source documents. Luckily it doesn’t come up all that often in my work, but when it does, I love my LOMs!
Note: Some of the chapter titles in my docs are so long that they wrap to 2 or even 3 lines on the Table of Contents page. I can put non-breaking spaces into the marker box so that I can control the line breaks from the source file whenever the generated LOM is updated, or add a line break character. In a dialog box, type \ (that’s backslash spacebar) for a non-breaking space and \r for a line break.
More posts on using generated files in FrameMaker
Adobe FrameMaker: Including chapter numbers in a table of contents
Adobe FrameMaker: Removing bold from page numbers in a table of contents
Hi Barb,
When creating a list of markers that contains some markers applied to a bullet list, is there a way to display the parent paragraph number in the list of markers document?
Currently, I get the correct chapter, page, and paragraph numbers against each marker; however, for markers applied to a bullet list item, I get a bullet instead of the paragraph number.
I appreciate your feedback.
Hi Khalil:
Not that I’m aware of.
~Barb