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

[Caroline Tabach]

Lin
thanks  for getting back to me.

Are there people with experience with groups?

I will look up those numbering articles and think about either this
suggestion, or the suggestion of using conditional text.

I have to present the ideas to the SMEs next week



On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 2:34 PM 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
> > _______________________________________________
> >
> > This message is from the Framers mailing list
> >
> > Send messages to framers at lists.frameusers.com
> > Visit the list's homepage at  http://www.frameusers.com
> > Archives located at
> > http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/
> > Subscribe and unsubscribe at
> > http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com
> > Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com
> >
>
>
> --
> Lin Sims
> _______________________________________________
>
> This message is from the Framers mailing list
>
> Send messages to framers at lists.frameusers.com
> Visit the list's homepage at  http://www.frameusers.com
> Archives located at
> http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/
> Subscribe and unsubscribe at
> http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com
> Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com
>


-- 
Caroline Tabach
Technical/Marcom Writer
e-mail: caroline.tabach at gmail.com