Text Inset vs. Variable Question

[Jang F.M. Graat]

Hello Maeli,

The move from MS Word to FrameMaker is good news, but why the choice for unstructured FM ? The type of document you are hoping to create would be ideally created in structured FrameMaker. Using huge numbers of variables in FM is going to make the author's life hell and is not going to make maintenance of the manuals much easier. Text insets in unstructured FrameMaker are extremely limited and may cause the system to break down as it needs to open 100s of files at the same time when updating the main document.

This kind of work is what structured FrameMaker is excellent for. Instead of text insets in the form of an entire flow in a FrameMaker file, you can reuse single words, table cells, paragraphs or anything else to be pulled in. With the attributes available in each element, you can easily link each item to an element in a database (or Excel sheet). In one of my projects, I am building service manuals that have 100s of parts lists, each containing up to 50 parts, each of which is pulled out of a single file that holds all the parts info. Updating this service manual is a matter of pressing one button and takes 5 minutes. And with the built-in XSL engine in FrameMaker, attribute-based filtering and ExtendScript all in the box, i.e. without installing any third party procuct, there has to be a REALLY good reason not to use this product in the way it was intended.

If you HAVE to work with unstructured FrameMaker, possibly because of some outdated regulatory principles, there are still options to automate the work using ExtendScript, but it becomes much harder to program - and harder to check if the results are OK. If you need support in getting the info from MS Word to structured FrameMaker and/or automating the process of pulling info from a spreadsheet into a structured FM document, I can offer those services. The nice thing about using structured FM is that this can be programmed without even having any real content available, so confidentiality issues can easily be avoided here.

Kind regards from Amsterdam

Jang

JANG Communication
Smart Information Design
Amsterdam - Netherlands
Cell +31 6 4685 4996
http://www.jang.nl


> I'm getting back to unstructured FrameMaker 10 (after two years of having to use MS Word). So apologies if I don't use some of the correct terms or if I'm misunderstanding some of FrameMaker's capabilities!
> 
> I'm doing the planning work for converting a technical manual from MS Word into FrameMaker 10. The system has over 100 parts, currently each part has two to five different variations on the name scattered throughout the manual, so a huge component of this conversion is getting the nomenclature down to a single version of each part name. Since most of the names will change at some point in the next year my goal is a single point of edit for each part name, to save some headaches down the road.
> 
> On previous projects I've used ~20 part name variables (created in a master file, then applied to each *.fm file through a book update) and then inserted that part's variable any time I need to use the part name.  For this project with 100+ parts it seems like that could start getting painful, just in terms of scrolling through a massive variable list.
> 
> I was thinking that I could use text insets as another option, if it were possible to import from a single cell in a table (e.g. excel file). That would let me use the spreadsheet that I'd have to create anyway for planning out the variables (and internal tracking of what name I'm assigning to a given part number).
> 
> In the past I've used text insets to reference repeated short paragraphs, using a series of individual text documents to hold each paragraph. So I guess I could do the same thing again, but then I'd end up with 100+ text files, which seems like a different kind of inconvenient compared to the 100+ variables.
> 
> One major limitation: with my organization's network policies I cannot install 3rd party software, and the review and approval process to purchase extensions or supplements to Adobe's software would be so arduous that it may as well be impossible. So I'm limited to what I can do without having to install anything else.
> 
> Any advice or suggestions would be appreciated! (Or even advice on where I could go to read up on the various ways to effectively manage nomenclature updates in unstructured FrameMaker.)
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Maeli Zacchetti