[Framers] Advice on slimming down a guide; customized guides per customer??

[Robert Lauriston]

My first thought would be to migrate to Flare or Paligo, which are
much better at that sort of reuse.

On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 5:24 AM Caroline Tabach
<caroline.tabach at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I have converted the very large Word user guide to FrameMaker.  I am using
> Unstructured Frame 2017
>
> This is a guide for a product which has general information about how to
> use the product at the beginning, and a few chapters with general
> information at the end.
>
>
>
> The product is made up of  100 "boxes" which belong to 5 families  (I am
> just calling them boxes for the sake of the example)
>
> The FrameMaker book I made uses only chapters, not volumes, there is a
> chapter for each box family, with information about each of the boxes in
> that family.
>
> Each customer only needs to user 4 or 5 "boxes", so we want to make user
> guides that are smaller and more focused
>
> I have made a book with everything in it, and now I want to show the SME
> how we can use Frame to make smaller guides. I am wondering about the best
> way to do this.
>
> 1. Make 5 books each with one box family in it, which will contain info
> about all the boxes in that family as well as the general information. end
> users will receive the guide with info about the box family, they will have
> info about 15 boxes even if they only bought one
>
> 2. Redo the guide that I did and make the box families to be volumes, and
> then each box is a chapter. .
>
> This means it will be easy to add or remove boxes from the guide, this also
> means it is possible to customize the guides per customers
> The company are using heading numbering, so this means redoing all of the
> heading of all the paragraph styles, which might get complicated
>
> 3. Another idea I had was to set the book up as described above, with a
> chapter for each box family, but to have each box as a text inset, and be
> able to create user guides per box. Highly customizing this, but means I
> don't have to mess with the numbering, but maybe this will make life
> complicated
>
> What would you recommend?
>
> Are there advantages and disadvantages of each method?