Structured vs Unstructured documents

[QuintinSeegers]

This poor horse is most likely beyond rescue from all the flogging, but I'd like to resuscitate the poor creature.

I've been using Framemaker (Unustructured) for the past 15 years, starting on FM 7. I've always had to work with styles and tables defined by others. A few years ago I was in the position to redesign the styles (paragraph and character) and tables for our training manuals (book) to bring them into line with our corporate style guidelines. This resulted in 3 primary documents:

• Template_Master.fm: This is the master template all documents is created from.
• Variables.fm: This documents contains the standard variables used across all manuals. A copy of this file is created for each manual (book) with the variables updated accordingly.
• ConditionalText.fm. This document contains all the standard conditions used across all manuals. A copy of this file is created for each manual (book) with the relevant conditions applied.

When a manual (book) is updated and prepared for publication, File > Import >Formats is used to update all formats, definitions and styles from the Template_Master, then the Variable Definitions are updated from the Variables document and lastly, the Conditional Text Settings from the ConditionalText document.

This process has served us well for the last few years, except when a new Variable or Conditional Text Setting needs to be added. However, as the Keeper for our training collateral, I'm starting to wonder if switching to Structured documents is the way forward. I've seen many forum posts and have found many documents/youtube videos on creating and using structured documents in FrameMaker. I'm concerned that the interface for Structured Framemaker would be too overwhelming for our writers/editors. Most of our writers/editors' skills are limited to using MS Word (personally, I think writing any kind of manual in Word is like cutting a diamond with a sledge hammer - it'll do the job but it ain't going to be pretty!). They're used to applying Styles to text (a la Word), so the concepts of Elements would be too foreign for them.

I'd appreciate feedback from the community on whether there would be any benefit/advantage to us switching to Structured FrameMaker, or whether we're best to continuing with our exsiting process.

[QuintinSeegers]

Not to resurrect an old post, I thought I'd share a funny little story about how this project is going.

As you all would have noticed, I been inundating the forums with my questions about EDD's, conversion tables, etc. (Apologies after the fact!).

Today I had to put together a new document within a few hours (don't you just love those projects with deadlines within a few hours!). As our conversion to Structured Framemaker is still a way off, I had to create the document in Unstructured Framemaker. Ugh! The constant battle of 'which paragraph style should I use here again?',  'If I did this as a structured document, I didn't have to think about which bullet/heading style to use here'  and 'In a structured document, all these extra bits would be created automatically.'

So, it's official. I've been converted to a Structured FrameMaker supporter! (Disclaimer - I will be posting more questions!)

[Stefan Gentz]

Love that! It's something I hear often: At the beginning, it's a little bit painful, but once you're there, you never want to go back.