Automatic, Bleeding Thumb-tabs in Adobe FrameMaker

Intro­duc­tion and Overview

The fol­low­ing method of cre­at­ing self-positioning bleed­ing thumb tabs in Adobe FrameMaker is the most com­pre­hen­sive solu­tion for accom­plish­ing this task and was devel­oped by the Brad Ander­son many years ago. Although the process is a bit involved, by fol­low­ing these instruc­tions, you will have suc­cess­fully cre­ated a set of bleed­ing thumb tabs for your tem­plates in less than an hour.

This method of cre­at­ing auto­matic bleed­ing thumb tabs allows you the flex­i­bil­ity of hav­ing a sin­gle sequence of tabs run­ning from top to bot­tom of the doc­u­ment or restart­ing the tabs every cer­tain num­ber of chap­ters. This method also allows you to used the tabs within a sin­gle FrameMaker file or sep­a­rate FrameMaker files in a book.

These are some of the ben­e­fits to using this method for cre­at­ing the tabs:

• uses the same mas­ter page lay­out for all documents
• auto­mat­i­cally posi­tions the tabs ver­ti­cally on the left and right pages within one or more documents
• restarts the tabs at the top of the page as needed
• change the spac­ing of the tabs with ease
• uses a solid color or graphic as the tab — tabs can be any size and will bleed off the page
• places text on the thumb tabs and auto­mat­i­cally cen­ters the text both hor­i­zon­tally and ver­ti­cally on the thumb tab

Bleed­ing Thumb Tabs in FrameMaker