[Framers] Who's in charge?

[Craig Ede]

You want to use defined formats for everything in FrameMaker and not format as you go. Starting with anything that has cruft in it is likely to give you remnants of formats that lie around on master pages, the various catalogs, etc. My take is that all beginning uses should design a template from the ground up to make sure they understand how all the different Framemaker containers work.


The File > Import Formats menu choice gives you a pretty good idea of what's important.

[cid:c37663a5-d84d-4073-81ad-3f7895b539a4]

Here's how I would arrange the container hierarchically:

Document Properties

Page Layouts (i.e. Master Pages)

Reference pages

Paragraph Tags

Character Tags

Table Tags

Cross Reference Definitions

Variable Definitions

Conditional Text Formats

Object Styles


Starting with an absolutely blank template (i.e. all of the above containers empty of anything that defines their character), you can set the document properties as you desire, create a master page, a reference page, a series of paragraph tags, character tags, table tags, cross reference definitions, variable definitions and conditional text formats to populate your template. You can then create another template using the same names to create another view of your content, which can be very different from the first view.


Doing this from scratch demonstrates the power having names for instances of each of the container instances.


When I create a template for anyone, I create a reference document that ticks through the containers. Headings are used for each container and examples of all the named elements within the container are described. (For example: Master Pages: Left, Right, First; Paragraph Tags: 1Head, 2Head, Body; Char tags:strong, emphasis, code, etc. etc. etc.


So think of FrameMaker as a series of containers within containers: Document, Page, Paragraph, CharTag, etc etc.


So much for the sky-high overview.


Craig

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