First Hurdle

[Steve Rickaby]

>Congratulate me, friends!

I congratulate you.

>As a newbie, I just completed my first preliminary manual in FM without overrides or unresolved xrefs or any other shenanigans that I can see. Everything appears to work great. Hah! It's pizza for me!

A good feeling, and certainly worthy of pizza. But beware - FrameMaker is addictive. (As is pizza.)

>I'm working with legacy documentation created in Word and FM 7.0
>unstructured. The goal is FM 7.0 structured. As I understand it, once
>you have a clean unstructured document, the next step is EDD development
>(of which I have no clue), is that correct?

Yup. But only if you need a bespoke EDD. (And only if you need structure.)

>Also...another dumb question probably...I read up on how the FM conditional text feature works, and it apparently will fit nicely with our documentation - but are there any pitfalls or difficulties to it in structured FM?

Afaik, conditional text exists only in FrameMaker's imagination. However, it has some important applications in EDDs themselves. Lynn Price is the expert here.

Regarding FrameMaker content, I don't know myself of any special issues regarding structure. The general rule with conditional text is to keep things simple, else it can turn into a maintenance nightmare.

>One final question...is structured FM difficult to learn? I have to
>admit that it looks daunting to me. How long did it take some of you to
>learn?

Some of me learnt it in a few days. However, it depends on where you're coming from, where you've been, and where you want to go. Structured FrameMaker, being essentially a metalanguage, is as complex and daunting as you need to make it. One thing's for sure, though: you'll find lots of help in this group. I certainly did.

Keep that gas flowing... ;-)

-- 
Steve