I am sure if you had a look at FrameMaker 11, the newly changed Quick Catalogs i.e. Smart Insert (also called as Control Shortcuts, F8/F9) wouldn’t have gone amiss! With this feature, we can use keyboard shortcuts to bring up element catalog at the insertion point – a great productivity enhancement! The catalog also supports typeahead, which allows us to jump to a specific element quickly, by typing the first few characters. In Framemaker, we have had this small but powerful feature for quickly applying style tags. It has been a useful feature for Framers from a long time and we have tried to make it more useful with the new capabilities in FM11. Lets check whats new in it!
Let me explain in brief how Smart Insert works: They are shortcuts to allow users to quickly apply paragraph, character styles and others over different objects via control key shortcuts. It is a unique capability to navigate between the list by typing starting characters. e.g.
- Press F9 key or CTRL+9 –> Para list would appear
- Type starting characters of the style
- Press ENTER (Result = The selected style is applied on the paragraph)
Similarly, all the 10 shortcuts like CTRL+n have their respective usage:
CTRL + n | Style/Element List Usage |
0 | for Inserting Variables |
1 | for Inserting Elements (Hierarchical) |
2 | for Wrapping Elements (Hierarchical) |
3 | for Changing Elements |
4 | for Applying Conditional Tag |
5 | for Removing Conditional Tag |
6 | for Making Text unconditional |
7 | for Applying Element Attributes |
8 | for Applying Character Tags (also F8) |
9 | for Applying Paragraph Tags (also F9) |
- CTRL+ALT+Down Arrow = Next Sibling
- CTRL+ALT+Up Arrow = Previous Sibling
- CTRL+ALT+Right Arrow = Child, if exists
- CTRL+ALT+Left Arrow = Parent, if exists
- Better typeahead experience in a new interface
- Allows traversal through styles/elements via single-key traversal (starting character)
- Allows looping between the top and last elements
- A timer that resets the search to the starting character(s) after a gap, (Press ‘ch’ to search for ‘chapter’ variable smart inset menu, after a gap, pressing ‘c’ takes us to the first variable starting with ‘c’), etc .
- In-line appearance of the style catalogs
- Hierarchical view for Elements
- Better navigation experience via arrow key and mouse both
1-min Video: FrameMaker 11: Smart Insert