After designing the page layout, define how you want the text to be formatted:
If your document will be opened or printed on computers other than your own, use fonts that are widely available.
Paragraph styles provide the foundation of text formatting, so set them up before setting up the character style.
When creating a character style, set all the options in the Character Designer as As Is, and then specify only the settings you want to change. This way, the style will work with any paragraph style.
Use tags that express the purpose rather than the appearance of the text. For example, name a format for emphasized text Emphasis rather than Bold. Then if you decide to change to italics for emphasized text, you can redefine the Emphasis format without having to retag any text.
Use names that are easily recognizable. For example, you might name the styles for numbered lists Step1 and StepNext rather than st1and stn. Or, if you want to use the keyboard to apply paragraph and character styles, consider naming your tags st1 Step1 and stn StepNext. That way the tags and descriptions are quickly available from the keyboard.
If the template uses more than one series of autonumbers, add a series label to the format for each autonumber. For example, define step autonumbers as S:<n+>, where S: is the series label.
In paragraph styles, use either Space Above or Space Below consistently to add space above or below the paragraph. (FrameMaker uses only the larger of the two values to determine the space between paragraphs.)