Adobe FrameMaker

Template Design Best Practices

Front Runner courses are available online, on-site, at your place of business or at our Front Runner location.

Please note that Front Runner does not provide public courses. As needs vary from client to client, we focus on meeting those specific needs.

Our clients prefer either one-on-one customized or team training.

We offer the option of choosing the topics clients need to get the job done. This ensures greater success, once the client is back in the trenches, using the software.

Reasonably priced rates are available for team training.

If you are interested in courses not listed, please ask. We have the resources to teach more products than are listed on our training pages.

Overview:

Our FrameMaker Template Design course emphasizes the development of FrameMaker templates incorporating the principles of good document design and best practices using FrameMaker's powerful features. Many of the topics will be familiar to those using FrameMaker.

Please note: This course is version agnostic. It covers the why & how of template content and documentation design.

This course is only for unstructured templates.

Structured templates require a structured application and then template format is mapped to the structured elements, i.e. EDD creation.

This three day course teaches participants the concepts they need to know to use best practises to design a template supported by FrameMaker.

Delivery: Instructor-led, hands-on delivery either online, on-site at your place of business or at Front Runner. Our custom training meets your needs.

Duration: 3 days

Further Learning:

XML
Essentials
Adobe FrameMaker
Read/Write Rules
Adobe FrameMaker
Structured FrameMaker EDD Development
Adobe FrameMaker
Authoring Structured Documents

Objectives:

Upon successful completion attendees should be able to:

Document Analysis - identify and determine the needs of those who will use the documents
Plan the FrameMaker template
Determine the output the document will be viewed in Principles of good document design
Page layout - page size, white space, margins, typefaces, type sizes, leading, line width, interactions of type size, line width and leading
Highlight techniques - tips, notes
Provide specific format considerations for technical manuals: Copy formats
Create a "usage and rules" document for authors
Localization (translation) considerations
Apply settings: Body pages; apply Master pages; Headers and footers; Add custom master pages; Map paragraph tags to master pages
Add text frames
Refine Paragraph Styles with the Paragraph Designer
Use keep with options
Understand Widow and orphan properties
Adjust paragraph hyphenation
Apply global update options
Work with advanced numbering properties, building blocks, series labels
Design character styles: Create and apply character styles; apply a character style to an autonumber
Special bulleted paragraph styles
Use Color: Apply color to character, paragraph, and table tags
Tables: Create new table styles, apply table properties; ruling and properties; paragraph styles in tables; include graphics in tables
Work with Reference Pages
Boiler plate graphics
Book Building: Set up numbering for chapters in a book; create a book file
Tables of Contents: Generate and format a table of contents
Indexes: Generate and format an Index
Test and Update Templates
Organize your Templates

Call to schedule your customized course, we are flexible to cover any features required for your training needs.

Optional Topics: May be able to covered over the three day period:

Anchored Frames and Graphics
Variables: Insert, change and add variables
Conditional Tags: Apply conditional tags to text
Create a conditional watermark
Cross-references: Change cross-reference formats - add building blocks and character tags; add custom cross-reference formats, Hyper-link cross-references