disagreement on overrides

[Syed.Hosain at aeris.net]

> The way I've been "brought up" as a Frame user was to avoid overrides
> wherever possible. I'm now working with a writer who is much more
> liberal about overrides than I am. We currently work only on
> unstructured Frame documents; output is PDF (to print from or for use
> onscreen). Right now, we're the only two writers working on the doc
> set in question.
> 
> Have any of you been on either side of such a difference in approach,
> and how did you go about resolving it?

I assume by "overrides", you mean a person applies font formats and
other paragraph formats, etc., to text and paragraphs from the menu bar
or key strokes, and does not use the templates that were developed for a
good reason!

Our approach is to fire anybody who does this. And, I am only just
kidding a little bit! We have had technical writing contractors, who we
let go because they would not follow our rules in this regard.

Seriously, the problem with overrides should be obvious. Anytime, a
given template or paragraph design or character design is changed, then
the reapplication of that new design can cause havoc with the overrides.
Particularly when there are a gazillion of them - it is usually
impossible to find each one and figure out why they were done, etc.

So, we disallow text and paragraph overrides - people who do them, tend
to learn the hard way, when their nice, pretty, document, gets messed up
when somebody else has to do some edits to the documents.

Now, in Word or Powerpoint, we have too many people doing their own
edits in this manner and the result is that we periodically have to dump
a new template onto everybody and rap knuckles accordingly when we do
this. Does not always work.

Z