ABCM

(Download)

ABCM is a comprehensive conditional text replacement tool for structured Frame, allowing you to use structural attributes to indicate and manage your conditions, instead of traditional conditional text tags. This methodology, along with the advanced features of the plugin, provides the following advantages:

• Simplified management of multiple, overlapping conditions
• Whole file conditionalization within a book
• Detailed coloring of single and overlapping conditions as you specify, eliminating the automatic assignment of magenta text
• Natural preservation of conditions through XML and SGML roundtripping, including support for tokenized strings of values
• Storage of an unlimited amount of non-publishable material (such as authoring comments and draft content) in your source files, with a guarantee that it will always be removed before publishing
• Convenience of element boundaries to delimit conditions, rather than error-prone condition tags
• Simplified show/hide process, using "schemes" to program and run the filtering logic (no more Show/Hide box confusion!)

ABCM is distributed as fully-functional freeware. It includes a comprehensive user guide and a tutorial to get you started.

If you rely on conditional text, which many authors do, ABCM may be your answer to liberating yourself from the frustrations of the traditional FrameMaker feature. If you are not using structured FrameMaker yet, this software may be reason enough to convert.

As an added benefit, the major functionality of ABCM is exposed through the FrameMaker API, available for automation through other API clients or third-party scripting tools. See the User Guide for more information.