FrameMaker 101 – Adobe FrameMaker Creating and Editing Content

Class Description
In this 2-day class, Participants will learn the concepts and skills to effectively work within FrameMaker and more importantly: make FrameMaker work for them! This industry-leading product allows users to easily author and publish multilingual technical content across myriad platforms, such as mobile, web, desktop, and print!

Our instructors are industry professionals and will not only teach Participants the program, they will also devote time to the various common mistakes, productivity shortcuts, and best practices.

Course Benefits
Through a combination of instructor-led presentations, demonstrations, and hands-on labs, Participants will deepen their familiarity with FrameMaker concepts, whilst gaining hands-on experience in developing, evaluating, and optimizing their work for visual appeal and productivity! 

FrameMaker keeps track of numbering, cross-referencing, complex tables, TOCs, IXs, and formatting. Many industry professionals attest that nothing can publish to online formats and PDF like FrameMaker. In short, using the techniques they learn in this course, Participants wil see why tech comm experts have made FrameMaker an indispensable part of their workflow for more than 20 years!

Got a complex table that spans 30 pages or more? Bring it on! Need to pepper your user guide with cross-references to procedures including section numbering, titles and page numbers (but only in the PDF, not the online versions?!) FrameMaker makes all of this a breeze. In this section you’ll learn how tables and cross-references are two of the most solid and least to be feared things you can produce and manage in your documents. A deep understanding of these two concepts alone can make a world of difference in managing your content.

Suggested Prerequisites
This class is appropriate for novice to intermediate level users of FrameMaker. It is expected that users have a basic understanding of why and how they expect to use FrameMaker in their environment.

Course Outline
Using FrameMaker to make your job easier!

  • Understanding the FrameMaker workflow
  • Setting up a FrameMaker workgroup
  • Navigating the FrameMaker Interface
  • Tweaking the FrameMaker interface
  • Using templates in a template-based workflow
  • Publishing to mobile and help formats

Styles: Let FrameMaker do the heavy lifting!

  • Using paragraph styles
  • Using character styles
  • Understanding object styles
  • How styles help manage content, layout, and publishing
  • After this lesson, you’ll be able to write and properly format faster than ever before. More importantly, you’ll be laying the foundation for manageable editing and publishing as part of your template-based workflow.

Rock solid tabes and cross-references

  • Understanding proper use of tables
  • Modifying table content
  • Table odds and ends/more advanced concepts
  • Referencing: Cross-References
  • Intro-Cross-References
  • Basic Cross-References
  • Template Design: Cross-References

Grab their attention and don’t let go!

  • Working with content: Using graphics and rich media
  • To Frame or not to Frame
  • Using anchored frames
  • Placing and controlling rich media

Stop trying to reinvent the wheel!

  • variables
  • text insets
  • conditional text
  • built-in integration with Dropbox and leading content management systems

After this lesson, you can simplify your content strategies based on version number, configuration, and/or output target.

Long documents and digital publishing

  • Creating and managing book files
  • Defining tables of contents
  • Indexes and index markers
  • Print, PDF, and Electronic Publishing, including more detail on the Help/EPUB/mobile publishing process
  • Overview of PDF review cycle, commenting features in Reader
  • Creating PDF for import, and automatically updating FrameMaker content from the PDF comments
  • Reintroduction of digital publishing

After this session, you’ll have a full working knowledge of managing FrameMaker content and appreciate the merits of a template-based workflow.

Related Classes

Our goal is to make sure your class meets your objectives, not ours. Therefore, all of our outlines are treated as guides to help steer the workshop. This outline does not guarantee that all the topics listed will be covered in the time allowed. The amount of material covered is based on the skill level of the student audience. We may change or alter course topics to best suit the classroom situation.

Locations