FrameMaker and meta-documents

[Steve Rickaby]

Dear Framers

I'm researching an article on the use of FrameMaker for creating meta-documents,  that is, documents built using various populations of text and/or graphic insets. As this is not something I've actually done myself 'in anger', only played with, I'd appreciate any experiences, pitfalls etc. that anyone would like to share.

I've identified the following possible options/levels of variant organization:

*  Conditional text insets into anchored frames on master pages can be used to switch page backgrounds, ornaments, etc. I have set up a test and verified that this works, but I'd be interested to hear whether anyone has made use of this method, and if so, for what.

* Conditional text insets into body pages can create variant documents based on standard inset files.

* Unconditional text insets into documents can create different document versions based on standard inset files  (the 'standard' modular document approach?).

* Multiple book files can create different book versions based on standard and/or variant documents.

Are there others?

I will also mention the  use of ur-books to collect all inset files for spell-checking, searching and so on.

Thanks. 
-- 
Steve