[Framers] Who's in charge?

[Steve Rickaby]

Dennis - other have answered most of these points. I sympathize: FrameMaker is a big learning curve, but you likely won't regret it. My 10c below...

At 08:46 -0800 29/11/16, Dennis Brunnenmeyer wrote:

>As a relatively new beginner, I hate to bother experts with this question, but where can I find concise information about the topics below. I have the original Adobe 7.0 book as well as their Classroom In A Book. Neither of them, as far as I can tell, address the overall concept of how these tools described below interact with each other. Instead, those books seem to be just a list of step-by-step procedures on how to accomplish tasks.

I never rated the Classroom in a Book series much, although others may disagree. However, although FrameMaker 7 is old, it's entirely usable as long as you don't need anything like DITA or structure. (Actually, it's also usable for structured docs, but that isn't of interest to you right now.)

>Oh, and I also have The Complete Reference / FrameMaker 7 book by Sarah O'Keefe and Sheila Loring. It's size alone is intimidating, but maybe the information I need is somewhere in there.

Yes, it is. It's a very comprehensive book. You could do worse than work through the earlier chapters on FrameMaker basics.

>It seems to me that there are three ways to affect paragraph styles:  1) Paragraph designer while in Body view mode, 2) Paragraph designer while viewing Master and Reference Pages, and 3) the Formatting Bar.

Not really. Paragraph styles are defined in the Paragraph Designer and are global to a document. Similarly, character styles are designed in the Character Designer, and table styles in the Table Designer. You get the idea. These are independent of whether you are viewing body, master or reference pages.

As others have said, don't use the formatting bar. It is heap bad juju, and only there to stop folks who are used to work feeling uncomfortable ;-)

>Compounding my confusion is the fact that there are character and paragraph styles on the Reference pages that aren't in the Character catalog and Paragraph catalogs.

Not really. The stuff on the reference pages of a black FrameMaker document is not paragraph and character style definitions, which are global to a document. The reference pages contain a rag-bag of special-purpose stuff, the meanings of which will become clearer as you progress with FrameMaker.

If you have inherited a FrameMaker document/template, it is not impossible that someone has added a reference page that lists the paragraph and character styles and their definitions and/or purposes, but these would only be documentation, not the actual definitions. It's hard to be clear on this without seeing your document.

>When working on a paragraph on the body pages, it seems like the Formatting bar and the Paragraph designer sometimes "disagree" with each other. Trying to change the  Default font style for a paragraph sometimes doesn't "take hold," meaning no visible changes are made when applying the desired change.

I think this has been answered already, but always use the respective designers to define your styles.

>If I want to change the color of the text in a paragraph designer, do I need to create a new character format or a new paragraph format?

It depends on what you are trying to achieve. If the colored text will always be  applied to an entire paragraph, such as a warning message, then define a paragraph style for it. If the color will only be required to be applied to one more words, define a character style.

Note that character style attributes are additive. If you wish to define a style that *only* applies color, use the 'Set Window to As Is' command in the Character Designer's Commands pop-up menu, then define just the color. This will ensure that the new character style will apply only the color attribute to the underlying text, rather than forcing/changing the font, text size and so on.

>Again, all I'm looking for, as far as I can tell, is a proper reference document that explains the interaction between these tools,  a general discussion of when and how they interact, and which one to use.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by a proper reference document, but I suspect that what you are looking for is something that explains the theory and thinking behind the FrameMaker document design model. If you master this early on, you will be well set to leverage the power of FrameMaker. If either of the books you mention and the online help don't help you, you might find this article, which give an overview of creating an unstructured FrameMaker template from scratch, of assistance:

<http://www.frameusers.com/uploads/2016/09/Locking-down-document-design.pdf>

-- 
Steve