Know how Adobe FrameMaker provides features to manage various paragraph, character, and table styles.
Paragraph styles apply at a paragraph level, character styles at a character or word level, and table styles apply to complete tables.
Paragraph and table styles: Place the cursor inside the paragraph or the table, and select a style from the catalog.
Character styles: Select the text and click a style from the catalog.
You can change style properties and then use them to redefine or update the stored styles and all the text in the document tagged with them.
To update one paragraph style or all paragraph styles in the document with a property group from a paragraph, click in that paragraph or select consecutive paragraphs.
To update more than one paragraph style but not all paragraph styles, select consecutive paragraphs that use the styles you want to update.
Importing paragraph or character font definitions is also possible through the command.
To update a paragraph style in Adobe FrameMaker, do the following:
Choose to open the Paragraph Designer.
To display the properties of the style, including any overrides, select the text to analyze.
To display the properties of the style as defined for the style, choose the style from the Style drop-down list again.
Change any properties, and then click Update Style. FrameMaker asks whether you want to remove overrides.
To update a character style in Adobe FrameMaker, do the following:
Choose to open the Paragraph Designer.
To display the properties of the style, including any overrides, select the text to analyze.
To display the properties of the style as defined for the style, choose the style from the Style drop-down list again.
Change any properties, and then click Update Style. FrameMaker asks whether you want to remove overrides.
To update a specific property of a paragraph or character style in Adobe FrameMaker, do the following:
To update a specific property of a paragraph style, choose to open the Paragraph Designer.
To update a specific property of a character style, choose to open the Character Designer.
If you are updating specific style properties, change only the property you want to update.
If you are updating a single property group of a style, select Set Window to As Is from the Commands drop-down list of the Designer dialog to set all formatting definitions to As Is. Change the properties as needed.
Choose Global Update Options from the Commands drop-down list.
If you are updating a paragraph style, choose if you want to update the style definition with all properties of all property groups (All Properties) or only with the changes made in the current property group (<Property Group Name> Properties Only).
The Global Update Options of the Character Designer does not have this option as the Character Designer has only one property group.
In section Update Paragraph Styles / Update Character Styles:
Select All Paragraphs And Catalog Entries or All Characters And Catalog Entries to apply the selected style to all paragraphs/characters in the current document.
Select All Matching Tags In Selection to apply the changed style definition to all paragraphs or characters in the current document that have the same styles applied as the selected paragraphs/characters.
Select All Tagged to change all paragraphs/characters in the current document from their current style to a new style. See the section Reformat all paragraphs with a new style for more details.
Click Update Style in the Designer dialog box.
In Adobe FrameMaker, you can change the paragraph style of all paragraphs in the current document to a new style. For example, you can change all paragraphs in the current document formatted with style “Normal” to “Body.”
To apply a different style to all paragraphs in the current document, do the following:
Selected a paragraph with the new style that you want to apply to all paragraphs with the current style.
Choose to open the Paragraph Designer.
Choose Global Update Options from the Commands drop-down list in the Paragraph Designer.
Select the target style from the All Tagged drop-down list.
Click Update.
Confirm the question “OK to change all <Current Style Name> tags to <New Style Name>?” with OK.
FrameMaker reformats all paragraphs in the current document formatted with <Current Style Name> with <New Style Name>.
To delete a paragraph style from the document style catalog, do the following:
Choose . The Paragraph Catalog is displayed.
Click the Delete button. The Delete Formats from Catalog is displayed.
Select the paragraph style you want to delete.
Click Delete.
Click OK to close the dialog.
To delete a character style from the document style catalog, do the following:
Choose . The Character Catalog is displayed.
Click the Delete button. The Delete Formats from Catalog is displayed.
Select the character style you want to delete.
Click Delete.
Click OK to close the dialog.
To rename a paragraph or character style in an Adobe FrameMaker document, do the following:
To rename a paragraph style, choose to open the Paragraph Catalog.
To rename a character style, choose to open the Character Catalog.
Choose the style that you want to rename from the Style drop-down list.
Enter a new name in the drop-down list Style and click Rename.
Deleting a style from the document style catalog does not affect the content that has this style applied. The content simply has a style applied that isn’t in the catalog.
To add paragraph or character styles that are applied to paragraphs or characters but missing in the style catalogs, do the following:
Choose , and then click Continue. FrameMaker adds any paragraph or character style used in the document back to the catalog.
If you’re designing a new template or if the template you’re using is incomplete, you may have to create new styles. The easiest way to create a style is to modify the properties of an existing style.
When you’re creating new styles, consider these suggestions:
Use consistent naming conventions for similar kinds of paragraphs or text items within a paragraph, such as “Head1” and “Head2”.
To apply styles by using the keyboard, name the styles so that often-used ones are unique or alphabetically first in their letter group, such as “H1-Head2” or “H2-Head2”.
Give each style a semantic name that’s easy to remember, recognize, and type. If you assign a style based on its use and not its appearance, you can later change the style properties without having to change the style name. For example, if you want to create a character style to mark up a term in bold, you could name the character style “term” rather than “bold”. You can define the font-weight “Bold” for this character style. If you later want to format all terms as italic instead of bold, you only need to change the font-weight and font-angle definitions of the character style “term”. This naming convention avoids the need to rename and redefine the style while at the same time keeping its semantic meaning.
Be aware of capitalization. Style names are case sensitive. Also, you sometimes want related styles to appear together in the catalog, with names such as “Body” and “Body-Indent”.
When creating styles for structured templates, maintaining
the template often becomes more comfortable, if you give a style
the name of the element that is use this style. E.g., if you have
an element like <shortdesc>, you could name
the paragraph style shortdesc as well.