View a file in Author with defined pages?

[shuber]

I just migrated to Oxygen from Framemaker. When I open a file in Oxygen Author view, a file is just one long white page that goes on forever. In FM, I had it set up so that I could see the individual pages in a file. I would like to set up Oxygen Author view to show defined pages with page numbers to give me an idea of where the page is going to break when I produce the PDF. Is this possible?

[Radu]

Hi Susan,

Sorry, but no.
In Framemaker it's possible that what you saw was close to the published PDF output in terms of layout.
Most full-XML editors (like Oxygen) are not WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) but WYSIOO (what you see is one option).
So the edited content might look totally different than the published content because the engine which is used to help you edit the content is not the same with the engine used to publish it to PDF (a bundled version of the DITA Open Toolkit in this case).
So even if when editing in the Author mode you would see visual page breaks, most definitely they would not be the same page breaks which appear in the PDF (different fonts or font sizes for titles, paragraphs, different page layouts, etc).
Also from the same XML content you can obtain multiple outputs like WebHelp or EPUB, such formats do not have the concept of what a page is.
So this is why the Author mode is a single continuous editing area, because using XML implies disconnecting the content part from the publishing part which may use different layouts or paper sizes to present the content.

Regards,
Radu

[shuber]

Thank you for the explanation, Radu!