{"id":336,"date":"2012-06-08T11:50:26","date_gmt":"2012-06-08T11:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/?p=336"},"modified":"2014-08-25T11:11:22","modified_gmt":"2014-08-25T11:11:22","slug":"fmstyle-overrides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/2012\/06\/fmstyle-overrides\/","title":{"rendered":"Style Overrides in FrameMaker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the reasons I prefer FrameMaker over Word, is that it doesn&#8217;t automagically update your paragraph styles as you work. Word has a tendency to either add new items to the list when you make a tweak (Normal, Normal but Bold, Normal but Italic, Normal but 12pt and blue&#8230;), or to modify an existing style to match your one-off customization, and all of a sudden a paragraph two chapters back is mysteriously rendering in 14pt instead of 10 and when you fix it that extra-large warning note you were working on earlier has gone back to 10pt &#8220;all by itself&#8221;. There are settings buried in the software to determine what exactly happens when you modify a style, and where the change propagates to, but Word works in mysterious ways, and I just don&#8217;t have the time or energy to figure it all out.<\/p>\n<p>I favour the simple elegance of how FrameMaker does things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright  wp-image-591\" title=\"FMnormalStyle\" src=\"\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/FMnormalStyle.gif\" alt=\"FrameMaker Status Bar showing Paragraph and Character Styles\" width=\"167\" height=\"21\" \/>The paragraph and character styles for the selected text are shown in FrameMaker&#8217;s status bar.<\/li>\n<li><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-592\" title=\"FMmodifiedStyle\" src=\"\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/FMmodifiedStyle.gif\" alt=\"FrameMaker Status Bar showing Modified Paragraph Style\" width=\"167\" height=\"21\" \/>If there&#8217;s a manual override to a paragraph style (for example, a change of font), an asterisk appears beside the style name in FrameMaker&#8217;s status bar.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If there is a manual override, you can check what the original definition is in the <em>Paragraph Designer<\/em>, and decide whether the override is justified or not.<\/p>\n<p>If an override is justified:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>For a genuine one-off situation, you might want to just leave the override in place. Bear in mind, that if you reimport styles and say to remove overrides, you&#8217;ll lose the modification at that point.<\/li>\n<li>For a recurring situation, you might want to create a new style. For example, if you want the first paragraph of every section to be blue and italic to designate it as introductory material, that&#8217;s worth a new style. (Click <strong>Commands | New Format<\/strong> in the <em>Paragraph Designer<\/em>.)<\/li>\n<li>If you decide the override is one you&#8217;d like to see everywhere this paragraph style is used, then you&#8217;ll want to update the existing style to match the modified version. (Click <strong>Update All<\/strong> in the <em>Paragraph Designer<\/em>.)<\/li>\n<li>And finally, if you decide the override is invalid, you should just re-apply the correct style instead and move on. (Click <strong>Reset<\/strong> in the <em>Paragraph Designer<\/em>.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Simple and elegant. Me likey.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the reasons I prefer FrameMaker over Word, is that it doesn&#8217;t automagically update your paragraph styles as you work. Word has a tendency to either add new items to the list when you make a tweak (Normal, Normal but Bold, Normal but Italic, Normal but 12pt and blue&#8230;), or to modify an existing &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/2012\/06\/fmstyle-overrides\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Style Overrides in FrameMaker&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech-writing","tag-framemaker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":844,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions\/844"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sharonmurphy.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}