Outline

[Hedley Finger]

Scott, Gary:

> What you are referring to
> doing, Hedley, is operating in a structured environment.

You have misrepresented what I actually said.

I have used the DITA XML schema and the DITA-FMx plug-in for FrameMaker 
to develop structured documentation.  But it is certainly a far from 
trivial exercise to set up the structapp.fm file with all the formatting 
rules to get your preferred look and feel.  You would only take on this 
level of setting-up overhead if you could amortise the time/cost over a 
significant number of titles.

I do not think Donald was looking to get into structured documentation 
just yet.  He probably has a virtual structure where, in his mind and in 
his files, Heading 1 /is/ at a higher level than Heading 2.  For those 
who want some of the benefits of structure in unstructured documents 
without the hassle, I highly recommend Enhance for FrameMaker from 
Sandybrook Software.  You can configure it so that Heading 1 is indeed 
higher than Heading 2, so that when you collapse the Heading 1 block, 
any contained  Heading 2 subblocks are suppressed but revealed when 
Heading 1 is expanded again.

Enhance works pretty much like the structured view in Word and you can 
perform all the same operations in Enhance that you can in Word, 
including outlining when you are developing the structure initially.

So for Donald, Enhance is the way to go.

A structured document, preferable saved to XML and opened directly from 
XML (*.fm files are not used at all) has many advantages: you can use 
all the XML tools on the saved files but work in a friendly WYSIWYG 
environment.

Regards,
Hedley

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Hedley Finger

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