Unstructured to Structured: Question about retaining, paragraph formats

[Fred Wersan]

Just my two cents on this.

There is no right answer. Depends where you want the control to be and 
maybe your philosophical approach - as in "no formatting in the EDD".

When I went structured, it was an opportunity to reduce paragraph format 
bloat. I analyzed what I needed, pared down the paragraph and character 
formats and tried to stay that way. I didn't want a different format for 
every possible different formatting issue that might come up. In part 
this means that if you are strict about things you don't let users 
deviate from the set of formats that are provided. But you can cover 
acceptable deviations by putting formatting in the EDD (if your 
philosophy permits this).

As a practical matter, I have found that due to limitations in the EDD, 
there are times when putting formatting in the EDD works well and times 
when it just doesn't seem to work right. The conditions get too 
complicated and it isn't worth it.

Of course, as a lone writer, I get to make all the decisions, but I try 
to act as if it were a bigger setup - no changes to para formats and no 
new on-the-fly formats allowed.

With multiple books using the same EDD, they all have to comply or they 
get blasted every time I update the EDD, so there is a strong incentive 
to do things right.

A previous respondent said: "

The idea with structure is (as has already been said) to separate structure from display.?"


I am not sure that I entirely agree with that. The idea of structure, 
particularly in FrameMaker, is that the computer enforces the formatting 
based on the element structure rather than writers needing to apply 
formatting via paragraph tags as they go along. If you are in a 
non-WYSIWYG environment, then you don't get the display. In FrameMaker 
you get the display too, but you don't have to be responsible for it, 
just for applying the correct element tags. Whether the computer 
enforces the formatting based entirely on what is in the EDD or on a mix 
of EDD coding and para formats is an implementation detail. Either way 
the application of formatting is done by the computer, not by the user.

Fred

-- 
Fred Wersan
VT MÄK, Principal Technical Writer
68 Moulton Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
T: +1.617.876.8085 x124  Email: fwersan at mak.com

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