Today I got FrameMaker to pretend it’s a marketing tool and create a document with 2 columns of unequal width, and the ability to spread graphics across both columns. It’s not at all elegant, though, and I wonder if there’s a better way to do it. I’ve trolled thru the user assistance, and it looks as though you can easily create columns of equal widths, then span the graphics across using the “Span all side-heads and columns” attribute in the Paragraph Designer. But if you want unequal columns, you’ve gotta use text flows, and I don’t see an easy way to span graphics over them.
Here’s what I did:
I went onto the master page of a 1-column document (no side-heads) and added 2 new text flows. Be sure to choose “Template for Body Page Text Frame”, name them B and C, specify 1 column each, and don’t select automatically connect to existing text flow (which is not on the same window as the other selections). When you draw the text frames, leave a reasonable gutter, at least .25″.
The result is that you can control the text in the left and right text frames (B and C) by clicking in the columns, and you can add graphics that span both columns by clicking in the gutter. Needless to say, this is very cludgy! So far, I’m controlling the placement of graphics with pilcrows! I don’t think you’d want to do this for anything longer than about 4 or 6 pages, like my brochure. And in a perfect world, I’d get a different tool for this (InDesign?).
