OWP Palette

The script simplifies the entry and control of special foreign language characters in FrameMaker without having to enable the language or the respective virtual keyboard in the operating system.

Clicking on the desired character on the OWP palette will insert the character at the current cursor position.

Additional information may be displayed for the character selected in the document or the palette (name of character, Unicode range and decimal and hex values in different encodings).

Different pages in the OWP palette display the special characters of the European languages. It also contains all current code pages and symbol fonts.

Characters that are not supported until FrameMaker Version 7.2p158 are marked in red (1251 CYR: Gie, Dzhe, dje, kje; 1250 CE: Zacute, tcaron).

The two characters marked in green describe a special solution for FM 6.0 and 7.0 by itl and cap-studio to be able to display the two characters that are not available, namely Zacute and tcaron, in FrameMaker (‘Codepage Patch’; no longer recommended).

Other cell backgrounds in the palette that are marked in red indicate characters that are not included in the Windows codepages. These characters (not available until FM8) should not be used with conversion, translation and production processes that are based on a codepage-specific conversion.

The font used in the palette is Arial. There was anUpdate in 2/2007 for this font and other standard Windows XP fonts. The enhanced versions of these fonts have already been installed under Vista.
The respective characters are also marked in red in the palette.

The ‘OWP Char Info’ command in the text context menu (second mouse button) is used to display additional information for a character that is marked in a document. Alternatively, the key combination ‘Ctrl+y’ may be used.

This also works with special control characters (separators) and different space chars, which are saved with the FM specific code points.

Some special characters may be inserted in the document using the ‘Special Chars’ menu of the OWP palette.

Up to 16 fonts may be added to the palette using the ‘Settings’ menu of the OWP palette. If necessary, the size of the palette may also be adjusted.

If a character is inserted in the document using the OWP palette, this will only work correctly if the current font includes this character.

FrameMaker 7 also requires the use of so-called virtual fonts to be able to insert characters from foreign language code pages (e.g. Arial Greek). An error message will be displayed if the corresponding virtual font is not available for the current font.

Since FrameMaker 9, there is an internal FrameMaker character palette to insert characters and display character information.