style following inset

[Fred Ridder]

In response to Rene Stephenson, Richard Combs wrote (in part):> A flow always contains one or more pgfs. So a one-sentence flow is also
> a one-pgf flow; you can't avoid the pgf end. But you should be able to
> (I haven't tried it) define the source pgf as a Run-In Head so that
> there's no break after it. 
> 
> Here's another idea: Save your sentence as a text file and import that
> by reference. In the Import Text File by Reference dialog, select Merge
> Lines into Paragraphs. FM inserts the entire sentence at the cursor
> location, and it assumes the formatting of the container pgf. 
 
It's actually much easier (and better) than that! What you need to do
is select the "Reformat as Plain Text" option in the Import Text Flow by
Reference dialog. As long as the source flow contains only an end-of-
flow mark (i.e. does not contain a paragraph mark), the text will be 
imported into your target document as a plain text string, without
any end-of-flow mark. This means you can put sub-paragraph insets
*anywhere*, even multiple ones in the same paragraph. The only 
shortcoming of this approach is that you can't bring along any 
ormatting; the inset only contains plain text, but you *can* 
format the whole inset in the container doc. At my last employer, 
I implemented this kind of system for the titles of all the books in 
our System Release Bookshelf (about 50 titles), and all writers 
were supposed to use text insets rather typing the titles so that 
everybody's references would stay in sync when any of the titles 
changed. We just had to apply the "TitleRef" character tag to
italicize the titles after performing the insert.
 
Another point to note if you are dealing with short insets is that
they do not always have to be in separate files. My system used 
a multi-flow source document that had all 50 book titles in separately 
defined, named text flows. Just remember to keep the flow names 
short unless you feel like using Resource Editor to make the list 
box wider in the Import Flow dialog.
 
-Fred Ridder
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