As a technical author, I find FrameMaker's Special > Variables utility very frustrating. Whenever you insert a variable, the dialog box disappears and you have to reopen it before inserting a new variable. This struck me as very against the spirit of FrameMaker. One of the great advantages of FrameMaker over, say, Microsoft Word when handling styles is that the paragraph and character format windows are modeless, that is, they stay open permanently.

EZVars is a modeless dialog box very similar to the Character catalog. It lists all variables in the document and allows you to insert the content of a variable into the document simply by double-clicking on a variable name. Creating variables and modifying variable definitions continues to be done using the standard Variables window.

A checkbox on the EZVars window allows you to choose to display system variables only, or both system and user variables.

To ensure the lists in the two windows are in sync, EZVars has an Update button that re-reads the lists of variables maintained by FrameMaker and updates the list accordingly.

EZVars also provides the ability to easily replace text in your FrameMaker documents with a variable. For example, you can search for a product name that might change in the future and replace all occurrences of it with a variable that can easily be modified at some future point.

In the Find window, type a text string, select any of the standard FrameMaker find controls, then select the variable to replace the text string with. For each occurrence of the text string, you can selectively choose to replace each occurrence of a text string with the variable, or to skip this occurrence of the text string.

What's New in V3.02

New features are:

• The Convert window opens with any currently selected text preselected. This greatly simplifies converting text to variables.
• The list of variables is automatically refreshed whenever a document is opened.

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