Retrospectively standardising the styles across my book

Thu Jun 9 07:47:12 PDT 2011

Hi Andy

  As a newcomer to FrameMaker, you are coming across a number of paradigm shifts. No worries; like riding a bike, you only have   to learn them once. Kudos to you for teaching yourself.

  FM knows no document/template distinction such as you have in Word. Any FM document can function as a template. What you need to do is to get one document to be as you want it - para formats, character formats, table formats, etc. Then strip out all the content and save it in your FM installation\Templates folder. Then when you do File, New, create your new files from it.

Having said that, there are some considerations that arise if you want to retrospectively bring your old docs up to par with the new template. When you import formats from one file to another (say from your new template into your old docs), any formats that have the same name (case-sensitive!) will be overwritten and updated. Any other formats that are not represented in your template will remain intact. So your old docs will *add* the template's formats to themselves while keeping any extra formats that they possess (hope I'm making that clear!).

As a consequence of this, you have two choices:
1. In your new template, use the same format names as you have in your old docs - just the definitions will be different. When you import into your old docs, all the old docs' formats will be overwritten.
2. If you use new format names in your template: import the template formats into your old docs, then use a plugin to delete the old, unused formats. There are free or inexpensive plugins that will do that for you (or you can do it manually, but that's a chore). Google "SiliconPrairieSoftware", "Cudspan tools", "FrameMaker plugins", etc. and you will find several.

Hope this helps.

Roger

Roger Shuttleworth
Technical Documentation
AV-BASE Systems Inc.
1000 Air Ontario Drive, Suite 200
London, Ontario
N5V 3S4
Tel. 519 691-0919 ext. 330
  _____  

From: Smith, Andy [mailto:Andy.Smith at veoliawater.com]
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Sent: Wed, 08 Jun 2011 07:48:11 -0400
Subject: Retrospectively standardising the styles across my book

Some of you may have gathered from the couple of questions I’ve asked before that I’m fairly new to Frame. I used 7.2 quite extensively a couple of years ago, although I never set up the project or the styles. Last year I started this project on Frame 9 and had to build the book and all the styles from scratch. I’ve pretty much taught myself as I’ve gone along.

I’ve done my best to keep my styles consistent across all my chapters, using one of the chapters as the master chapter but I didn’t manage to successfully set up a template at the beginning. So now I find that I would like to standardise all the styles across the document and retrospectively create a template chapter that contains the master version of all the styles.

Is there any advice on this? For a start should I attempt it at all or will it be more trouble than it is worth or should I just continue using one of the chapters as the master instead of having a template? Are there any other issues I should consider?

I do find that, sometimes, when I update the book I do get warnings about overrides which I assume are manual changes I’ve made to styles that don’t conform to the rest but I must admit I don’t understand this in detail.

Andy Smith
Documentation Engineer
Elga Lab Water
Lane End
Bucks
England

tel: 01494 887545

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