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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:

  1. Select the chapter title.
  2. Open Insert menu > Marker (Esc sm).
  3. Pick the Edit button from the Marker Type list, and add a short, descriptive name like TOC Title and click Add.
  4. Edit the Marker text to match what I want in the Table of Contents and click the New Marker button.
  5. I repeat the process for the byline as well.
  6. 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.

  1. In the book window, I choose Insert > List of > Markers.
  2. Double click the custom marker(s) from the Don’t Include list to scoot it over to the Include Markers of Type list.
  3. 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: Adding tabs to a table of contents

Adobe FrameMaker: Including chapter numbers in a table of contents

Adobe FrameMaker: Removing bold from page numbers in a table of contents

Adobe FrameMaker: More on customizing a table of contents

Adobe FrameMaker: Reusing a TOC or Index

Adobe FrameMaker: How to create a list of effective pages

Adobe FrameMaker: Creating a simple glossary for a book

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2 thoughts on “Adobe FrameMaker: List of markers

  1. 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.