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

[Robert Lauriston]

Flare is old-fashioned locally installed single-user Windows software,
like FrameMaker.

On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 2:12 AM Caroline Tabach
<caroline.tabach at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> We did look into that, but my understanding is that it is cloud based and therefore not appropriate for what we are doing.
>
> On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 7:37 PM Robert Lauriston <robert at lauriston.com> wrote:
>>
>> 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?
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>
>
>
> --
> Caroline Tabach
> Technical/Marcom Writer
> e-mail: caroline.tabach at gmail.com