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

Wed Oct 10 13:38:03 PDT 2018

Why am I reading on a FrameMaker list that other products do things better ???  Even if in your opinion they do, we don't need to hear it. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Framers [mailto:framers-bounces+rmelanson=highresbio.com at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Lin Sims
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2018 12:19 PM
To: Frame Users <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Subject: Re: [Framers] Advice on slimming down a guide; customized guides per customer??

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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