First Hurdle

[William Abernathy]

MATT TODD wrote:
> All,
> 
> Congratulate me, friends! 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!

Congrats.

> I'm working with legacy documentation created in Word and FM 7.0
> unstructured. The goal is FM 7.0 structured. 

Whose goal is this, and why? I've seen the gee whiz demonstrations from Adobe 
reps and been utterly convinced that I Need Structured Docs Now! only to return 
to my pdf-output-only client projects that have no real need for structured 
Frame. Before committing, make sure there's a business case for structuring.

> 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? 

You need someone who has a big-time clue about XML and document type definitions 
to set up your structures.

> 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?

The one I seemed to fall into the most when learning is that there is a bias 
towards showing conditional text. So if you have text under both Condition A and 
Condition B, you can't hide it if either A or B is toggled on. Also, it can 
screw up your pagination to have text popping in and out, so you need to be 
careful to test different editions using the same source for different output 
docs. Conditional text can be a little hard to parse at first, but once you get 
the hang of it, it becomes your bestest friend in the whole world.

> 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?

I've been working with regular Frame for six and a half years now, and just 
fielded my first structured project. Someone else defined the structure, and I 
just had to beat the requested changes into the old structured format. It's 
taken about a man-week to get to the point where I understand the element tags 
I've been handed well enough to produce valid documents. If pressed to define 
structural elements from scratch, I would not know where to begin.

--William Abernathy