Text insets: to be or not to be?

[Rene Stephenson]

Carla,

Thanks for your detailed insight! We're looking at a move to structured FM when the product line stabilizes. Should I be inferring from your statement that text insets don't play well in Structured FM? (Excuse me if my ignorance is showing...)

Most (if not all) of the other places that we use text insets, we've kept the file to the smallest chunk possible and tried to avoid using anything above the body text level of formatting. But, a few of the text insets are used in over a dozen different places. Working around those as topical files at the book level could become a very involved slice-and-dice operation. Is that what's really necessary in all instances of text insets toward structure, or would using topical setup only for the chunks that are heavily condition tagged suffice?

Thanks
Rene

"Martinek, Carla" <CMartinek at zebra.com> wrote:We create a intro page (FrontPage) for each chapter, and then link in
the topical files behind it. It works for us. (...)

We set this up with the expectation that we will be moving to structured
content (XML/DITA), and topical is the way to go for that.  Also, once
we move the topical content to XML, our Tech Support Help Desk will
easily be able to grab and reuse the content for their needs.

-Carla