DITA "tutorial" fails or is it me?

Thanks again to both you and Scott. I am making considerable progress. 'Snot easy I didn't expect it to be, but getting started was much more complex than I had expected. You pointed out that it's a different skill set. Heck, it's a whole new paradigm.

Thanks for all your assistance.

Le Sellers,

In addition to Scott's advice, I recommend showing the elements in your document, that is, select View > Element Boundaries (as Tags). In this view, you will see the start and end of each element and be able to see easily which elements are inside each other. It is the same information as in the structure view, but may be a little easier to comprehend. NOTE that your cursor MAY not display at its true position. If this is a problem, then select View > Element Boundaries. In this view, the elements' start and end tags are displayed as square brackets and the cursor will display at the correct spot.

ALso look in the Element menu. You can change an element to another element and you can wrap an element with another element, as well as unwrap an element from its content. This may help to understand the concepts of elements.

To reiterate what Scott said above, although people talk about tagging content with elements, it is not the same as tagging paragraphs and characters with formats as in unstructured Frame. In structured Frame, tagging is more like wrapping content (text and other elements) in an element.

Van

I recommend that you play around with some existing structured documents to get a good understanding of using elements before trying to build your own structure application (EDD, etc). Create some new docs using the samples provided (File > New > Document: Templates\Structured\...), and read up on authoring in structured files .. in the online Help you'll find a whole group of topics under FrameMaker Basics > Working With Structured FrameMaker Documents.

Good luck!

...scott

Yes, there are elements in the catalog. As soon as I inserted "Document" at the beginning of the file, the Structure View window was populated with all of the elements I had created. Many of them, especially the table cells, are now showing up as elements. But, most of them are red, and they have not transferred the characteristics (fonts, spacing, etc.) to the text identified with them.

And, when it try to change an element tag of something already tagged, the entire document changes to the chosen element (although it still doesn't pick up the correct formatting. That's another puzzle, but at least SOMEthing is now happening.

Thank you.

You don't identify the text in the document as an element .. you insert the element first into an empty document, then put the text into it.

If you click the Element Catalog button, do you get a window with some elements listed? If so .. just double click one of them and you should see that element inserted into the document (and visible in the Structure View window).

...scott

I guess I'm slower today (and yesterday) than normal because I'm not seeing the obvious.

My blindness is about how I identify a chunk of the text in the actual document as an element from the EDD. The guide doesn't say, that I've noticed. I keep using the word "magic" because it looks as though it's just supposed to happen. In my world, it doesn't work like that.

Le Sellers.

The root element is the outermost element in the document. Elements contain text and other elements. A structured document CANNOT have text outside of an element. Therefore, there has to be at least ONE element in the document; it is the root element. All the structure in the document is inside the root element.

A very simple EDD would be one with two elements, say Document and Paragraph. The root element is Document and it contains many Paragraph elements and no text. All text would be within the Paragraph elements. Then your document would be just a sequence of paragraphs. Of course, an even simpler EDD would have just one element, the Document element with all text inside it, no paragraphs, no lists, no titles, no figures, just text. But that defeats the whole purpose of having structure.

Van

Le Sellers,

Just saw your newest message.

When you say that the only element showing in the Elements catalog is Document, that is because Document is the only element allowed at the root level. You have probably set the Element catalog to show only those elements allowed at the insertion point, which is sometimes helpful for someone new to structured Frame. You can change this by clicking Options and set the catalog to show all elements.

Regarding paragraph styles, in structured documents you add elements from the Elements catalog to create your document's structure. You do NOT do this by tagging things with paragraph formats. Ideally, you should never have to use the paragraph designer. You should design your EDD to do all the formatting. The easiest way is to first create paragraph formats, as you would in unstructured documents, then in the EDD you specify when to apply each format. I cannot remember the EDD element, but you can find it in the developer's guide. The more you learn about formatting from the EDD, you will be able to wean yourself away from paragraph formats for most things. You still need them to format the TOC, Index, etc.

Van

Van sed:

"you have to insert at least one element before anything shows up in the structure view. The element you insert is typically the root element; you insert it from the Elements Catalog."

This seems to be the magic I am missing.

HOW do I "insert ... one element", and what does the term "root element" mean?

The highest level element in the tutorial EDD is "Document", and that's the one that all text in the test document is connected to in the Elements window.

My sincere thanks to both you and Scott for your help here.

Le Sellers,

The EDD contains the allowed structure; it is not the template. Even though the EDD can control formatting, it is not the template. The template contains those things that are not part of the EDD, such as master pages, reference pages, etc. So, once you create your EDD, you then open a new blank document and import your EDD into it. THIS file is your template. Typically, you would save a copy of this file to be used as the starting point for new documents. Note that you can improve upon this starting template by editing the master pages to be what you want, add additional master pages, format the reference pages, add graphics to the reference pages, etc. This is updating your template.

As Scott said, beginning with a fresh copy of your template, you have to insert at least one element before anything shows up in the structure view. The element you insert is typically the root element; you insert it from the Elements Catalog.

Hope this helps,
Van