A

Anonymous

Question

Advanced FM9 training, UK

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
July 2, 2012
6 replies
1445 views

Looking for advice on how to find a good training course for a small group in the Salisbury (Wiltshire) area. The course needs to cover book files, TOCs, cross referencing, PDF setup, and hopefully some Acrobat PDF finishing techniques. It would help if it was geared towards technical writing.

Are there any references or accreditations from Adobe that I should look for?

(The last course our office went on taught some bad practice in paragraph numbering - by using separate paratags to reset numbering, rather than nested numbering whare each level is reset by the one above. I would like to make sure we don't get anything similar this time.)

Many thanks.

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Matt-Tech Comm Tools

Community Expert

Regarding references and accreditations: The FrameMaker 10 Certified Expert exam (the latest exam available) is weighted toward advanced knowledge of both structured FrameMaker and single sourcing/multichannel publishing. (I have current ACE and ACI in each of the Tech Comm Suite products )

If you are interested in someone with workflow and practical experience, the FM10 ACE would be an excellent way to ensure knowledge of how FM fits into the tech comm ecosystem.

Every ACE and ACI (certified instructor) can publish current credentials to you via Adobe's certified community.

-Matt

-Matt Sullivan, FrameMaker Course Creator, Author, Trainer, Consultant

4everJang

Legend

Unfortunately, good or bad practices are not prescribed by the tool. As fas as I know, the Adobe Certified Expert program looks at technical knowledge about the products rather than methodology that might be considered good practice in a specific domain. Which is fine for a tools provider but leaves you with little to base your choice of trainers on.

One thing that can greatly improve the quality and consistency of your team's writing, especially in the technical writing domain, is the use of Structured FrameMaker. With just a little extra training about the Structure View and a non-technical introduction into the XML-like model on which this approach is based, this authoring environment will help your team to avoid all kinds of problems and bad practices. The structure defines what is possible for the author and also handles automatic formatting of elements according to where they reside in the document. Dragging and dropping materials to restructure the documents becomes very easy and cannot invalidate the structure or the formatting.

I would be more than happy to deliver a beginner's course in Structured FrameMaker in the UK, tailored to your needs, i.e. including all the topics you mention plus the creation and maintenance of the EDD you will need to start using Structured FrameMaker. I can also provide automated conversion of legacy FM documents to Structured FrameMaker, so you would not have to start writing again from scratch.

Anjaneai_Srivastava

Adobe Employee

Hi,

We do have some really cool tutorials for various features and tools in FrameMaker, some of your questions would get covered and apart from that you can learn a lot more in Structured FrameMaker domain.

Check these -- http://tv.adobe.com/product/framemaker/

Hope these helps !

Thanks!

Anjaneai

A

Anonymous

Thanks Anjaneai, that looks like a good starting point, though we might still want to look for a course tailored to the work we do.

many thanks,

Ruth

A

Anonymous

Hi Jang,

That's a very interesting point you make, and we will have to give it some serious thought. I have a fair bit of experience using Structured FrameMaker from a previous job (though not with creation and maintenance of EDDs), and you are absolutely right about the difference it would make to our output.

However I'm not quite sure how it would work out where I work now. Most of our output is (currently) on paper, we publish in very low volumes and most of our work has a limited lifespan. We have to cover a wide variety of books on quite a few different platforms - so quite a lot of different formats/EDDs are required. In addition, we do a lot of fragmented work, where we produce individual procedures and amended pages for insertion into existing books - as I recall, this would be a problem in Structure FM, where modules are generally amended as a whole.

I'm sure we could standardise our formatting more than we do at the moment. But I think that unless we were to completely re-think the way we work, the ratio of time spent on EDD maintenance v. producing output would be on the uneconomical side. I would be interested in your opinion and any suggestions you have.

Best regards,

Ruth

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