New to the list, and asking for help

[Steve Rickaby]

At 16:37 +0100 16/1/07, Pedro Pastor wrote:

>1)       I cannot understand how to clearly separate structure from
>presentation in FM. If EDD contains structure and presentation
>information we are against the main principles of SGML/XML document
>design!!
>
>2)       It seems like there are two placeholders for storing
>presentation information: Templates and EDD documents. This could be
>redundant, I mean, the same presentation definition data could be store
>on both places.

Pedro... Daniel, Scott and Matt have already given you great answers to your interesting, and understandable, questions. All I'd wish to add is to suggest that, if your are planning to create your own EDD, you initially try using text formatting rules that refer out of the EDD to the FrameMaker's document's tags for formatting?

This is by no means the only way to do it, but it follows the principle that software engineers call 'separation of concerns': each 'thing' should have only one task. Here, the EDD controls the structure, and the FrameMaker document controls the presentation. Swap the template, and you can completely transform a document without any change to the EDD.

Don't be misled by the fact that you can import tag definitions into, and out of, an EDD. This is merely a side-effect of an EDD being a structured FrameMaker document. This is just one way of storing tag definitions, and probably not a good one other than for simple documents. Equally, do not be misled by the fact that a non-EDD FrameMaker document can be used to store and propagate structural information: again, this is almost certainly not a good way to achieve this... keep it in the EDD, and import from there.

So, for 'weird and complicated', instead read 'powerful and flexible' ;-)

-- 
Steve