Retrofitting FM 7 book to use templates

[_Justin_Whitney_]

I'm inheriting a legacy project in FM 7 in which each doc in the book (about 12 docs, soon to grow) uses a separate variable and style set. I'd like to consolidate these and other aspects of the documents by basing them on the same template. What's the best approach to do that? I'm new to Framemaker and can't find any "save as template" or "apply template" type of functionality.

I know I can Import variable lists from one doc to another. But I'd like to be able to do global product name changes in one location.

Thanks for the newb help!

[Art Campbell]

It sounds, from the limited info available, that the easiest way to do this would be to pick the chapter that's closest to what you want the end product to be and SaveAs the file to a new location to create your template. Then modify that file as needed -- there are a number of tools within FM that allow you to copy in portions of other files that will enhance your chapter template.

When you have the template in shape, you can apply it -- or portions of it -- to all files in your book with one command, and then clean up the outlying elements.

Art