Organisation: European Space Operation Centre (E.S.O.C)
Date: Thursday, 19 Nov 1992 08:57:25 CET
From: <SLYNENSK@ESOC.BITNET>
Newsgroups: comp.text.frame
Subject: SUMMARY: Variables in paragraph autonumbering

First of all I want to thank for the replies received. However, there
does not seem to be an elegant solution to the original problem -
only a few (and useful) hints to get around the problem.

The original posting said:

>I want to be able to do the following:
>
>...
>            1  MyChapter                   (tag: Heading)
>               ..............
>               ...........
>
>  MyChapter-1  A requirement .....         (tag: Requirement)
>               .......
>  MyChapter-2  Another Requirement .....
>               .......
>
>               ....................
>               .......... .......
>....
>
>However, I found no way to pick up the name of the heading in the
>automatic numbering definition for the requirement. Ideally, I
>would have specified it as:
>
>R:\t<$paratext[Heading]>-<n+>\t
>
>The only solution I have found so far is to define a seperate
>paragraph tag for each case in order to do the automatic numbering,
>but this seems to be too tedious.
>
>I shall summarise the replies I get.


David Cortesi (cortesi@helium.informix.com) replied:

>You have diagnosed the problem correctly. Frame permits <$x>
>syntax in only two contexts: cross-references and system variables.
>Not in user variables. Not in autonumbers. Not in the prefix
>or suffix of generated page numbers (which makes it impossible
>to have a chapter number dynamically created in a TOC or index).
>
>You should express your desires on this subject to comments@frame.com
...
>If you did not require the chapter title to precede the number,
>you could do it with a cross-reference:
>
> 1 (MyChapter) A Requirement...
>   ^^^^^^^^^^^ xref
>
>If you could permit the number to be on the extreme right, you
>could do it with right-alignment of the paragraph and a
>left- and right-aligned tabs:
>
>       >A requirement....                              MyChapter>-1
>       ^..left-tab                 xref................^^^^^^^^^|||
>                                        right-tab...............^||
>                                            autonumber...........^^
>
>In short you have to get an xref on the "inside" of an autonumber.
>Good luck,
>  Dave Cortesi


Kurt Gutzmann (gutzmann@acri.fr) replied:

>Yer right, it's tedious.  I am also looking for some fine solution to
> this feature.  Apparently, variable definitions may only be simple
>(no compound defns using other variables), except for
>system-variables. That is, you can use a system variable in the
>definition of a user variable, but not a user-var to define another
>user-var.
>
>These same concepts seem to apply to the use of vars in autonumber
>tags. Requirements documents are an excellent testing ground for
>these bugs/features. Keep me posted on your progress.  Good luck.


Paul Singleton (csa09@seql.keele.ac.uk) replied:

>I speculate that FrameMaker's notion of document structure is
>fundamentally inadequate: *it* sees a document a merely a sequence of
>paragraphs of various formats; *we* see a document as a hierarchical
>structure of e.g. chapter, section, subsection, etc. The notion of
>"the nearest previous para of type 'Heading'" is a clumsy equivalent
>to "the ancestor para of type `Heading`.
>
>This is not directly relevant to your posting :-)


Steen Michael Lynenskjold,
Computer Resources International,
European Space Operations Centre (ESOC),
Darmstadt, Germany.
Newsgroups: comp.text.frame