what is the best option for editting content within a scrollable frame?

Question

I've made a popup glossary for my document, using a scrollable frame with all the glossary terms within it. Ideally each of these terms would have a button that links to the point in the document the term is found. My issue is figuring out the best way to edit content in the scrolling frame once its been created without dragging the frame up over and over to reveal the terms and add their respective buttons. My first thought was to create a new doc the height of the whole filled out frame and then embed that doc into the main doc within the scrolling frame, but it seems the buttons placed in the embedded doc don't function in the main doc.

So whats the best way to work with the content within the frames? the story editor is the obvious choice for text editing but not useful for adding each button.

Edit - upon further testing it seems anchored buttons within scrollable frames don't activate, is that true or am i doing it wrong? for reference:
 - On masterpage, i have a button that activates an animation of the main glossary frame, which is also a button (so that clicking outside can hide the frame)
- within the main frame is a long text frame placed within, the scrolling feature works
-within the text frame are anchored buttons over the term set to go to destination linking to the text anchor

Answer 1

To edit content in a scrolling frame, you could resize the frame to reveal the scrollable content and edit it there.

It sounds like your embedded content method may have had issues with the links from the embedded content to the document in which it was embedded. Here's some information on relative links that can help:

• Link from one document to another with InDesign and in5

Another option that you might try is to use InDesign's Index feature to store the glossary term references with their associated pages. When you generate the index, it not only includes the pages numbers where the term can be found but also creates a link to that page. Whenever you want to update the glossary, you can regenerate the index as a new text frame. Copy that new text, select the text in the scrolling frame, and paste to replace it with the new index/glossary content. Here's more information on creating a index in InDesign:

• Create an index

Comments

Its seems like the index option will work best, or at least utilizing hyperlinking similar to indexing. the issue with generating an index in this case is it can only fill out the terms, if definitions are added afterwards and you update the index all the definitions will disappear. the search will continue.

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I'm back again. Now my question is whether there is a way to open my glossary to a set location within the scrollable frame? I'm guessing its a no, for a few reasons, InDesigns bookmark anchor system generally just links to the page of an anchor and not always the vertical position, and also because my glossary is housed on a master page i can't create anchors/bookmarks in it in general.

is there another option to get this working? I'm exporting for multipage web with SVG text.

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It's possible that you might have more luck making the glossary a second document that you export separately and then embed into your main document using the in5 Web Content interactive widget. The embedded document can scroll and have text anchors.

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I just tried this with no luck. I made a separate document, filled it with the glossary, added text anchors on the words, exported it using in5 Html for web, then embedded the index that was created into the main document using the Web Content Overlay. however the main document doesn't recognize the text anchors, so i have no way to reference the terms within the main doc. in addition making it a web content overlay added some pretty ugly frames around all the edges of the embedded html within the scrolling frame.

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If you make links from one document to another (from the glossary document to the main text document), then I would recommend making relative links to the pages. Here's how to make relative links:

Link from one document to another with InDesign and in5

If you want to link to a specific page in the main document and it was exported with the Output set to Web, then use the following syntax in the URL where this example would take you to page 2:

index.html#p=2

Link from outside to a specific page of a long document

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Not exactly what i'm looking for right now. I'm try to get a link from the main text to open my popup glossary and scroll to the term within the scrollable frame. is that possible?

Answer 2

You might want to try using cross-references (x-refs). You can insert an x-ref by selecting the word you want to reference in the main text (Cross References panel menu > New Hyperlink Destination). Save as a text anchor (it will fill in with the name of the word if you've selected it). Then, in the text frame that will scroll, from the x-ref panel menu, choose Insert Cross Reference, choose Link to Text Anchor, and choose the anchor from the pull-down menu. You will probably want to click the little pencil next to cross-ref format to format how it will look in the text. Choose Text Anchor Name as the format and remove the quotes around it.

It fills in the name of the anchor for you. You can then put that text frame into a frame and set it to scroll. When you need to update the glossary text, it's a matter of double-clicking on the frame until you've selected the text frame containing the text. You can make any changes, click off, and it's set to scroll again.

Comments

Let us know how it goes. If it isn't what you need, we can take a look at your InDesign file to see what you have and maybe come up with a better plan of attack.

I meant to mention that there are also some scripts out there (or have been in the past, at least) that handle some of the repetitive parts of making cross references.

Best of luck!

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I don't think you'd be able to call the glossary if it's on the parent page. That being said, it would be easier to try and test with the actual InDesign documents.

I had a brief thought of trying to rig it using dynamic endnotes, but it might be more trouble than it's worth. Outside of these options, if it is even possible, you would probably need custom js/css/html written for you (either to use on export or after the fact).