Connected Text Frames

[gbrinkert]

So I have connected 7 text frames to display a series of variable licensing information. I have done this so that the text will 'wrap' inside of a circle.

 

Depending on the record being composed, not all of the text frames will be necessary. In these cases where there is not enough information to populate all the text frames, the "empty" frames end up repeating the information contained in the last-filled frame. How do I suppress the unused frames? or at least keep them from displaying repeat text?

 

I have provided an image to better explain what I'm saying.

[Dan Korn]

I'm not sure why the text is repeating there; it could be a bug. What version of FusionPro are you running?

 

In any case, I would do this the opposite way: Instead of using a series of connected text frames to hold the text, create a single text frame for your text, and then create some empty "dummy" frames at a higher layer with the "Text Wrap" box checked.

[gbrinkert]

Thanks for the reply Dan. I am using FusionPro Creator 8.2.7 w/ Acrobat X pro. I have a feeling it must have something to do with the number of frames that are being connected, as I've never seen this behavior before when connecting 2 or 3 frames.

 

And thanks for the work-around. It's not exactly ideal, but I knew there had to be another way of accomplishing the same thing while keep all the text in one frame. Designing in negative space... the idea just opened up a bunch more possibilities for me. Thanks!

[gbrinkert]

After trying to use the dummy-frame method of wrapping text inside of a shape, I've found it to be very unpredictable. Are there any tips or tricks you might use to make the outcome a little more consistent?

 

On some records it looks great, on others it looks more like the attached photo.

 

Is there another way of formatting this? I've looked through every manual/tutorial/web page I could find that refers to connecting text boxes and formatting text boxes. Any ideas would be awesome. My head feels like a frisbee

[step]

Just my hypothesis:

 

It almost looks like the "behind the scene" code is using an array and a for loop to populate those connected frames.

 

The code may see "bond program loans" as the last element in the array and populate each resulting text frame with the last element in order to make it through the loop. My guess is that the 'for' loop needs to be altered so that it stops executing after the length of the array rather than the number of text fields that you have.

 

Alternatively, I suppose you could manually set those text frames to be populated using the TextMeasure and assigning the values to them until the array is empty (suppressing the ones that are unused).

[gbrinkert]

Thank you Dan and Step for the help.

 

I found that the best work-around for my purposes was to keep all the frames connected but to simply add 5 returns into the Master text frame. This way the formatting is well-controlled (width, height, spacing above/below, etc.), and any "unused" frames are populated with a return character.

 

Again, not ideal, but it works.

 

Thanks again!