Unstructured to Structured: Question about retaining paragraph formats - Re-opened

[Chris Despopoulos]

I thought the idea was to format via the EDD, only.  Users should never just apply pgf formatting, because it will get lost (as you describe).  Structure demands template dictatorship on steroids...  Or rather, it imposes it.  To add new pgf formats, and to set up users to apply them, you would have to:
* Create the new formats
* Modify the EDD and the XML to include attribu.tes
* Use the attributes to set the current formatting for the given *element*
* Modify the EDD to set up format rules that map your formats to the attribute vals
* Store all the above in the template


In theory, you could create an attribute that is a list of values, and each value is the name of a pgf format.  Then you set up format rules for every pgf-level element to apply the format that matches the attribute value.  Then do the same for char, table, and other formats???  But this kind of defeats the purpose of structure.  The idea with structure is (as has already been said) to separate structure from display.  You want a machine to make the display decisions at the last minute.  And FrameMaker is just one such machine.  By using that principle, then you can automate great things, like if you move a section to become a sub-section, all the formatting adjusts automatically.  


I'm sure you know all this, but maybe you need to remind the customer.  Or maybe you need to interpret the customer request as a symptom that the EDD/DTD is not sufficiently specified for their project.  Maybe it's time to address more fundamental issues?
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