Text insets: to be or not to be?

[Rene Stephenson]

Hi All,

Thanks to Steve Rickaby for the informative article, "Composite Documents in FrameMaker" (ISTC's _Communicator_, Winter 2006).

We have a Preface chock full of safety notices, document feedback information, etc.  Down to the paragraph and sometimes even the word level, we have condition tags applied to enable proper output to show some stuff in certain hardware docs but not in software docs, some wording for particular products but not others, and some in domestic documents but not in international ones. Most of the tagged text has overlapping conditions. I guess that's a slightly complex application of condition tags to achieve the end, but it just evolved that way. We use variables in the text as well as the headers and footers for document-specific definitions.

In the past, we have kept the Preface as a template that the writers manually copied and pasted the text into their documents and then used the condition tags to show what's appropriate.  However, that method is burdensome on the writers and leaves room for error. 

What's the best way to approach single-sourcing such a Preface?  We tried text insets, but the heavy use of conditions really makes it a bear, and we have problems with the paragraph format displaying properly in the paragraph that follows the text inset. We tried pointing to the Preface template, but having to import variables and conditions before printing caused a log jam (bottle neck) at production time. 

The first couple of pages of the Preface contain the doc info (audience, scope, purpose, structure, etc.), and the stuff that's shared among the docs is in the latter 3/4 of the Preface. Would it work to split it into two files (the first part with all the doc-specific stuff just set up as a regular template, and the second part set up as a single-sourced file that everyone could point to from their books)? Or what other solutions might there be that are escaping me in my limited experience????

Thanks,
Rene Stephenson