Structured Framemaker, FDK and XML Blog

Every kid deserves a new toy. Mine, for the last few months, has been VMWare, about which I could not be more excited. You do need a lot of horsepower (especially RAM) and disk space on your host system, but once you have that you’re golden.

How is this relevant to Framemaker, you might ask? I have many jobs lately, it seems, only some of which require the use of Framemaker. Windows being a bit brittle and application uninstsalls being rather imperfect, I don’t want to pollute the machines I don’t use for Framemaker writing or tools development with Framemaker and Acrobat installations that will be difficult to dislodge later…

So I run Framemaker 7 inside a VM. (This also happens to be a great way to set up environments in which to test Framemaker FDK plugins or add-ons, so that they won’t interfere with the normal operation of Framemaker in any way.)

So this is all peachy– performance is just a hair slower than I’m used to, but everything works.

Except… (and you knew there was an except coming…) The clipboard.

In particular, VMWare has a feature that lets you share the clipboard between the host and guest virtual machines. And something in Framemaker doesn’t deal with this well. When you cut some content inside your structured Framemaker document, and then try to paste, you wind up pasting things that were on the clipboard quite a while ago, rather than the thing you just cut… Also, even in structured Framemaker, whatever you’re pasting shows up as a chunk of unstructured content instead.

Truly bizarre behavior.

This may be a nasty side effect (memory leak etc.) of a Framemaker plugin that we run where we work. I doubt very much that it’s a VMWare bug. (I suppose it could also be related to the Office 2000 clipboard, which can hold multiple items, and which I also use sometimes, but I never noticed this happen before I started running Framemaker in VMWare.)

But whatever it is, the workaround is to go into the VMWare preferences dialogue and disable sharing the clipboard between host and guest operating systems. Since I did that, I haven’t had a problem, though it is inconvenient to not have my clipboard shared between virtual and real machines at times…