inherit/propagate paragraph or character formats?

[ADTaylor]

Is there a way to change a particular setting for all paragraph (or character) formats in a document, or for all formats within a "family"? For instance, to change the hyphenation settings for all paragraph formats? Or to change the font for all "heading" paragraphs?

I think I'm wanting an object-oriented, hierarchical sort of thing, so there'd be a base format for a document, then a generic heading format, then heading1, heading2, etc., and with changes in a basal format propagating to its variants.

Is there any way to accomplish this in FrameMaker? (I currently have FM 6, but probably soon will upgrade to get more reliable SaveAs PDF).

 

[markso]

Framescript would be your answer

http://www.framescript.com/

If sunflower oil comes from sunflowers, and vegetable oil comes from vegetables, where does baby oil come from?

 

[volgadev]

We are planning to add such a functionnality to our plug-in (

http://www.volgadev.com).

Our project is to create some meta-format from which normal formats would inherit. In it's simplest form, we defined font charactéristics for a few meta formats that are Main text, Titles, Table text, etc.

Note that you have a Quick and Dirty way to achieve this through MIF format.

- Save your document in MIF format
- Locate the paragraph format section
- Replace all formats you want to be able to change with a unique identifier. For example, use $text_font$ for the font name for all paragraphs that contain plain text.

When you want to apply a format, replace all $text_font$ occurence with the real font name. Then open the file in FrameMaker and import the format in your document.

A less dirty way to go is to write à program in any easy to use language (we used Java for this) to automatically generate a MIF document containing the desired format. Open the generated document in Framemaker and import the formats in your document.

In fact, the program we wrote in Java for this is interfaced with Framemaker. When the MIF file is generated, the Java program calls Framemaker to open the file and import the formats in all documents listed in a file.