FrameMaker Tips

Search Basics

FrameMaker’s Find/Change is a powerful tool that can help you search for a lot more than just words.

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Category: Using FrameMaker

Relevance: All Manuals

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When you search for an item, you can customize the search by considering case, matching whole words only, or using wildcards. (More about wildcards in an upcoming issue.)

To search for any item:

1. Do one of the following:
   • To search in a document, click where you want to begin the search.
   • To search within a selection, select the text.
   • To search throughout the entire book, open the book or a document that belongs to the book.
   • To search through one or more documents in the book, select the documents in the book window.
2. Choose Edit > Find/Change (or ctrl + f).

3. Specify whether you want to search through the book, document, or selection. The Selection option lets you search through selected text if text is selected in a document, or it lets you search selected files if one or more book files are selected.
4. Choose the item you want to find from the Find pop-up menu.

5. Do one of the following:
   • If you chose Text, Paragraph Tag, Character Tag, Marker of Type, Marker Text, Cross-Reference of Format, Variable of Name, or Table Tag from the Find pop-up menu, enter the particular item you want to find in the Find text box.
   • If you chose Character Format or Conditional Text from the Find pop-up menu, enter additional information in the dialog box that appears.
   • If you chose any other item from the Find pop-up menu, skip step 6 and proceed to step 7.

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Tip

If you’re searching for a paragraph tag, here’s a quick way to get started:

1. Delete any previous content from the Find text box.
2. Place your cursor in a paragraph that uses the tag you want to search for.
3. Choose Paragraph Tag from the Find pop-up menu.
   The tag name will appear in the Find text box.

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6. If you entered text in the Find text box, customize the search by doing the following:
   • To find or ignore an item with specific capitalization, select or turn off Consider Case. For example, if you enter MAIN in the Find text box and Consider Case is selected, you won’t find Main. If Consider Case is turned off, you’ll find MAIN, Main, and main.
   • To match only a complete word, enter the word in the Find text box and select Whole Word. For example, if you enter phone in the Find text box and select Whole Word, you won’t find telephone.
   • To find a set of characters that may be part of a longer word or part of more than one word, turn off Whole Word. For example, if you enter old in the Find text box and turn off Whole Word, you’ll find words such as bold and oldest as well as old.
   • To find an item by using wildcards, enter the text and wildcards in the Find text box and select Use Wildcards. For example, if you enter Number[1-9] in the Find text box and select Use Wildcards, you’ll find all occurrences of the word Number followed by any number between 1 and 9. (More about wildcards in an upcoming issue.)
7. Click Find. If FrameMaker finds an exact match, it displays the page that contains the item and selects the item.

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To find the next occurrence of an item:

Click Find in the Find/Change dialog box, choose Edit > Find Next, or use the shortcut ctrl+shift+f.

To reverse the search direction:

Select Find Backward in the Find/Change dialog box and click Find.

To cancel a search:

Press Esc.

Note: This doesn’t work when searching a book.