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

[Caroline Tabach]

That sounds good.



Caroline Tabach

בתאריך יום ד׳, 10 באוק׳ 2018, 19:19, מאת Lin Sims ‏<ljsims.ml at gmail.com>:

> As a thought, you could use put all the "boxes" into a chapter (family) and
> control its appearance with conditions by marking the text for that "box"
> with a condition named for the customer. Then all you have to do when you
> create a book for a customer is set the Show Conditions to that customer's
> name and regenerate. That's actually probably the simplest solution, and
> FrameMaker is capable of handling dozens of conditions.
>
> On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 7:33 AM Lin Sims <ljsims.ml at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > My apologies if this response is late; I've been on vacation.
> >
> > Assuming I understand the situation you are describing, I think your best
> > choice is number 2. There are a number of good guides that describe how
> to
> > use FrameMaker's numbering blocks to set up some pretty complicated
> > numbering schemes without too much difficulty (I'd recommend the ones by
> > Lester Smalley and Dan Emory and I can probably dig those up for you if
> you
> > can't find them on the web), and once those are set up all you have to do
> > is regenerate the book when you go to publish, which you'd have to do
> > anyway for the Table of Contents.
> >
> > You might also want to look into using Groups, which I believe will let
> > you use individual files (your boxes) as sections of a chapter (your
> > families) without having to mess too much with the numbering scheme. I
> > haven't used Groups, though, so I can't provide too much advice on that.
> > The only caveat here is that each box will start on a new page, because
> > that's how FrameMaker handles files collected into a book.
> >
> > I do not think text insets is a good choice here, since you would have to
> > relink the text insets every time you create a book depending on what's
> > used for a particular customer and that could get both tedious and error
> > prone depending on how many customers you have.
> >
> > On Mon, Oct 8, 2018 at 8:24 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?
> >>
> >> Thanks for your ideas
> >>
> >> --
> >> Caroline Tabach
> >> Technical/Marcom Writer
> >> e-mail: caroline.tabach at gmail.com
> >> _______________________________________________
> >>
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> >
> >
> > --
> > Lin Sims
> >
>
>
> --
> Lin Sims
> _______________________________________________
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