What is a text inset?

[Fred Ridder]

N. Jain asked:
 
> I am learning FrameMaker 7.1. I have many times coming across posts mentioning text insets. I am confused. What is a text inset and how to insert it? Is a text insert different from a text frame? Please pardon me if my question sounds foolish.
 
A text inset is a text flow that is contained in some external
FrameMaker file and that is inserted by reference rather than
by copying. It is exactly parallel to inserting the contents of
an external graphic file by reference rather than by copying 
and pasting.
 
Text insets offer an advantage when you have chunks of text
that appear in multiple places, either in the same book or in
different books, but need to have the same content in all 
instances. You maintain one master copy of the content and 
insert it by reference in any file that needs it. This can be
particularly useful for things like legal "boilerplate" (disclaimer 
paragraphs, trademark acknowledgements, etc.), common 
notices or warnings, or any piece of description that is used
in multiple places. Another advantage is that the appearance
of the inset is determined by the style definitions in each 
different file that references the inset; you may have the same 
text from the same source file with markedy different appearance
in different books. 
 
Note that I referred to an inset as a text _flow_ that is inserted
by reference. In many cases may be convenient to have each
inset in its own FrameMaker file, but there may be cases where
it's more convenient to use multi-flow files to contain multiple
separate inset chunks. For example, you may have one file that
contains a half-dozen named flows, each of which contains a
different warning paragraph. 
 
-Fred Ridder
 
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