Getting to Know Framemaker: Books

My department is finally giving serious consideration to join the Framemaker (FM) club thanks in part to the open mindedness of my relatively new boss, who, like me, has recognized that it's time to divorce ourselves from the ubiquitous MS Word 2003. Before we jump board, I've been given the task to get a better understanding of FM, and how it would benefit our documentation and organization as a whole. Expect a few more posts about FM in the next little while :)

One of the things that distinguishes FM from Word is that it has the capacity to pump out long documents at relative ease. A feature that helps make this possible is the Book feature. There’s tons of useful information on this in the Framemaker User Guide (p.455), so I don’t want to bore you with excessive details.

Currently, a typical software manual is written in one single Word .doc file. This can be a pain to navigate around when editing and adding content, especially when each manual has the potential to go over 100 pages. What the Book feature offers to do, is break the manual into individual chapters and collect each chapter into one book (.book file). So essentially, each chapter, including the table of contents, becomes a separate document (.fm file). Pages can be numbered continuously from one fm file to the next and cross-references can be updated all at once. Even better, each .fm file can have its own numbering system (e.g. the TOC can have roman numerals).

What this all means is that if we were to use the book method, we’d do less scrolling, avoid the mistake of altering parts of the manual we didn’t intend to, and have a better picture of how the manual is structured. And that's a good thing.