Participant

Question

Technical Manual setup.

Forum|Forum|3 months ago
October 30, 2025
3 replies
169 views

Hi,

I am relatively new to FrameMaker, although I have had limited use of it for the past 7 years, but mostley doing edits to documents that have been provided to me. I have this week spent the last few days watching FrameMaker tutorials, mostly the ones by Barb Binder on YouTube, which has given me a much better unsderstanding of FrameMaker and how it works.

I have now been given the task of creating a set of Technical Mauals that I need to build a template for and I need to use information about various pieces of equipment in different orders in each manual.

For example I have FM documents which contain Technical Description informatrion for the following pieces of equipment: Airconditioning Unit, Battery Charger, Fire Extinguisher, Generator, Lighting System etc.

In Tech Manual 1 I need to have the Airconditioning Unit & lighting System

In Tech Manual 2 I need to have the Airconditioning Unit, Fire Extingisher, Generator & Lighting System

In Tech Manual 3 I need to have the Generator, Battery Charger & Fire Extinguisher

In my Technical Description section of the document I want to be able to have a Section Description, which will be the same for each manual (I assume this will be a seperate FM file) followed by the Paragraphs for each of the pieces of equipment that need to be described in that particular manual.

I have currently got it so that each piece of equipment will appear in the book as an indiviual page, or set of pages, and numbering etc all works, but is there a way to just get the Paragraphs from the FM document and have the book deal with the pagenation? Some of the descriptions are litteraly just a paragraph title and a single paragraph, so there are a lot more pages than there need to be when I put the book together.

I have done a search through the dicussion, but so far not found anything that appears relevant, I amy just be not using the correct term to search for.

Many Thanks for any suggestions,

Mark

frameexpert

Community Expert

There are two basic FrameMaker concepts that you might want to explore: text insets and conditional text.

Text insets. These are individual FrameMaker files that you create, usually with reuseable information. You can import these into other FrameMaker documents. For example, you can create a safety document with safety information that you can then import into other FrameMaker documents as needed. When you update the safety document, it will update in all of the other documents that it is imported into.
Conditional text. These can be snippets of text (or full paragraphs) that you can assign a "tag" to; for example "English" or "Metric". You have a single document with both types of content tagged appropriately. Then you show and hide conditions based on the particular output you want to generate.

Additionally, FrameMaker books can be used for your purposes. You can create FrameMaker documents for each of your main topics. Then you would have a book for each manual and include the appropriate documents in each book. Keep in mind that books are just pointers to FrameMaker documents, so you can include a single FrameMaker document in more than one book.

M

MarkJPearce73Author

Participant

Thank you, These two suggestions look like they will help me get to where I need to be.

I will do some more research on Text Inserts and Conditional Text to work out which works best for my project.

Thanks again for your reply,

Mark

frameexpert

Community Expert

Please let me know if you want to meet for an hour. I can give you a no-cost overview of text insets and conditional text. Contact me offlist at rick at frameexpert dot com

W

Winfried Reng

Community Expert

Hi,

I do not know, if I understand you correctly.

It would be easier, if you give an example with the files inside of your manuals. Are your manuals separate books?

If the descriptions are separate files, then each file will start with a new page. Which is probably what you have.

You could insert files as text insets into other files. Then the file would start below the previous file. However, your heading paragraph must not be set to start at Top of Page.

Best regards, Winfried

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MarkJPearce73Author

Participant

Thank you Winfried, you are correct this is what I have already done. I will investigate the text inserts option and see if that gies me what I am looking for.
Thanks again for your reply,

Mark

F

FrameMaker-dk

Community Expert

I am not altogether sure I understand your question correctly, but I suspect you would like to avoid blank pages. If that is the case you will go to Format -> Page Layout -> Pagination where you can work with the pagination setup

"Delete Empty Pages" will take care of the empty pages, but be aware that you need to keep an eye on your templates requirements for 1st page setup.

Bjørn Smalbro - FrameMaker.dk

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MarkJPearce73Author

Participant

Thank you for the suggestion Bjørn, I am already using the delete empty pages setting, what I am trying to do is remove white space at the end of a page, so that I get paragraphs one after the other. I think I have got a possible solution in the other suggestions.
Thanks again for the reply.
Mark

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