FrameMaker 201 – Adobe FrameMaker – Advanced – Template Design

Class Description
In this 3-day instructor-led course, Participants will learn the concepts and skills to effectively work within FrameMaker and more importantly: make FrameMaker work for them! This course aims to teach everything, and we mean everything, related to building and maintaining your template and a template-based workflow in Adobe FrameMaker. 

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
Our primary instructor has developed over 20 years of FrameMaker best practices, written two FrameMaker reference books in the past 4 years, and has created more video on Technical Communication Suite products than anyone else out there, including Adobe’s own team! He has strived to put as much of that content as he is able, into this workshop.

Aside from a wealth of knowledge and expertise, our instructors have dedicated myriad time to developing lesson plans and methods that afford Participants the most benefit with the least amount of time or effort wasted!

Who Should Attend
This class is intended for users that believe themselves to be proficient in FrameMaker functions and methods. This course is of benefit to those approaching, and those who believe themselves to have already crossed, the threshold of ‘Advanced user’.

Suggested Prerequisites
We highly recommend attending the Introduction to Adobe FrameMaker Creating and Editing Content class first.

Course Outline
Setting the ground rules

Working with templates is really about defining and enforcing standards. In this module you’ll evaluate your existing content, and set up standards that will help you create a framework for the rest of your template development.

  • FrameMaker Workgroup Standards
  • Define a template, and explain a template-based workflow
  • Establish naming conventions for Styles
  • Refine Tag Names (Paragraph, Character, Object, etc.)

After this lesson, you’ll have a clear understanding of how the pieces of the template fit together and have a checklist of things you’ll want to develop in your own template.

Poppin’ tags

The heart of a FrameMaker template is a combination of paragraph, character, and table formats. These styles are loosely referred to as “tags” and when you get them all working together, they can start slashing time spent formatting.

  • Creating Character Tags
  • Creating Paragraph Tags covering:
    • all 8 tabs of the Paragraph Designer
    • Right to Left languages
    • Extensive Autonumbering material

Once you’ve gotten the necessary tags created in your template, you’ll have enough to start using your template in your own work. While the template is far from finished, the organizational work is mostly out of the way, and you’ll be using these styles to identify content, not describe formatting.

What are those reference and master pages for, anyway?

FrameMaker content is created on body pages, but the master and reference pages contain valuable tools for presenting information and creating generated tables of contents and other files.

  • Master Page Definition
  • Sideheads and multiple columns
  • Automatically Assign Master Pages
  • Defining TOC Reference Page
  • Defining Indexes and Index Reference Pages
  • Setting up Template file Document Properties
  • BONUS: TOC Swipe File
  • BONUS: Index Swipe File

After this lesson, you’ll have branded pages, along with beautiful tables of contents and indexes. With formatting and page assignments controlled automatically, you’re now freed up to focus on content, rather than proofreading.

Setting up for the long-term

FrameMaker is for long docs, and docs with a long lifespan. In this lesson you’ll set up the things your users will need to quickly create and manage sophisticated, referenced information, like:

  • Setting up Table Formats
  • Defining Colors
  • Defining Variables
  • Defining Cross-Reference Formats

After this lesson, your users will be able to control table formatting at the book level, and create full, working references to other FrameMaker docs with the click of a button. You’ll understand how colors can be used across various aspects of your template, including autonumbering strings.

A lever long enough to move the world

A FrameMaker template is at its heart a way to leverage your effort. Will it move the world? Well that depends upon what you write with it! After this lesson, at least you won’t need to repeat yourself quite so much. Because here is where you’ll finish setting up content and formatting reuse in your documents.

  • Defining Conditional Text Settings
  • Defining Object Styles
  • Managing Templates with a Template Book
  • BONUS: Template Evaluation Tool

Conditional text and Object styles are two  topics that don’t get quite the attention they deserve, so buckle in and get ready to crank production up yet another notch.

The students have become the masters!

I’ll take suggestions on what you’d like to see most (either new or review topics) and run the session accordingly. Got it all figured out? That’s great, but you still have plenty of deep dive topics you can learn about, including:

  • Maker.ini hacks
  • Using free scripts, or ones that pay for themselves
  • Footnotes
  • Digital Publishing Overview

After this lesson, you’ll have a complete working template, and the skills to use it!

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.

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