TechNote

Text Insets in FrameMaker Won't Update

Issue

Changes to a text inset in an Adobe FrameMaker document are not updated when you open the document, even if the text inset is set to update automatically or if you choose Edit > Update References.

Solutions

Do either of the following:

Solution 1

Modify the text file at a time that FrameMaker can interpret the modification as occurring after the time given for the Last Source Update. See Additional Information for more information.

Solution 2

Double-click the text inset and choose Update Now.

Additional Information

Text insets may not be updated if the times differ on the machine running FrameMaker and the machine that owns the file system.

Text Insets are updated only if they are "stale." If you double click the inset you will see when the text file was last modified (Source Last Modified:) and when the reference in the document was last updated (Last Update:). The reference is updated only if Last Update is older than Source Last Modified. Source Last Modified gets its date from the machine where the file is located. Last Update gets its date from the machine running FrameMaker.

Example (UNIX):

FrameMaker is running on a machine, maxwell, but the text files are located on another machine, dune. Checking the time on these machines (at the same instance) gets the following:

maxwell: date Wed Jul 19 09:34:55 PDT 1995

dune: date Wed Jul 19 09:34:21 PDT 1995

dune's time is 34 seconds slower than maxwell's.

In this example, you must modify the text file 35 or more seconds after the time of Last Update in order for the text inset to update when opening the document or when choosing Edit > Update References. Note that the time of Last Update changes only when an actual update occurs.