FrameMaker9 Character Set - Dixieland problems

[Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain@aeris.net)]

> This is probably the wrong day to tell you this, so you're welcome to lay it aside for another
> day, BUT if you have "many overriders" in your paragraphs, you have yet to fully discover
> and appreciate what FrameMaker is meant to do. Let your overrides be few. FrameMaker
> is all about standardization and consistency, with an eye toward making your work life easier.

I completely agree with Jim's comment! Using overrides can come back and bite you when you need to change things later - usually global changes in documents. Then the exceptions can make you spend lots of time fixing things.

A trivial example (albeit Character Format related not Paragraph Format) ...

From habit when using Word (and other programs), people have a tendency to apply italics (or bolding) by selecting words and pressing Control-I (or Control-B) within FrameMaker.

While this method "works", the result is an override that can get accidentally removed in a heartbeat when the paragraph format is changed in certain ways - Word uses tend to live with this silliness!

A far better solution is to create Character Formats (use the AS-IS feature to avoid changing all items in the format!) and apply them to the desired selected text. I have "Emphasis" and "Bold" and "Underline" character formats for example - they gracefully handle the use of the correct italic and bold fonts regardless of the underlying actual font, when the correct settings are used in the Format.

Most importantly, that way, changing the paragraph format later will not mung your italics and bolding. Or, you can change the way the bolding or italics is done ... everywhere that you use them!

My only *minor* complaint with my method is that the italicizing is not conditional ... meaning, with a *single* Character Format called "Emphasis" I cannot get a slanted font when the underlying paragraph font is regular and a regular font when the underlying paragraph font is italic. I have to have two separate "Emphasis" formats instead. Oh, well ...

Z