We have extensive experience in the design of FrameMaker^® templates including the creation of paragraph and inline character styles, table designs, cross-reference formats, master and reference page layouts, the definition and application of variables, mathematical expressions, and the definition of element structures and hierarchical styles, a key feature of FrameMaker 7.

We have played a critical role in the definition of Novell's EDDs (FrameMaker's Element Definition Documents) by ensuring that structures were mappable to the DocBook DTD, Novell's choice for an SGML target format and also the industry's widely accepted standard for the development of technical documentation in SGML. DocBook is a very large DTD which can accomodate a wide variety of requirements and it is difficult to imagine that any single application would make use of the entire DocBook element set. It was our job to define an SGML subset of DocBook which would fully satisfy Novell's requirement and code it using the buliding blocks made available in FrameMaker's EDD options.

Element names used in DocBook are also quite general and when used "as is" in an authoring environment they can be quite ambiguous. An alternate set of element names reflecting the usage and style properties was also used in the EDD subset of DocBook.

Some important Rules must be observed when creating a subset of an SGML structure.

The FrameMaker Object Analyser creates a report of all object types defined in a FrameMaker document. This utility has proven to be indispensible for template designers. Oddly enough, no such service is provided by the FrameMaker product. The generated report lists in complete detail the properties of all building blocks defined in a given document. These are:

The Analyser is completely generic and independent of any particular FrameMaker template definition. We provide a more complete sample of a FrameBuilder document and its analytical report generated by the FrameMaker Analyser: Download FrameSample.zip (46K).

When accessible from the FrameMaker windows interface as an API client, this program is a very handy add-on for the template designer.

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