Converting_from_Flare_to_FrameMaker

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Converting from Flare to
FrameMaker
BA Template Conversion Process
November 2012

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012. All Rights Reserved.
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© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012 iii
Contents
Overview: converting from Flare to FrameMaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .5
A brief overview of FrameMaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
Overview of the conversion process within FrameMaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
1 Converting from Flare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .9
Preliminary preparation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Conversion process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
2 Working with the FrameMaker files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15
Concatenating the chapter documents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Importing and applying the new template formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Importing the new formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
Applying the new formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Paragraph formats . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Resetting the images . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Placing a new image . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
Dealing with snippets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Objectives snippet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Notes snippet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Best practices snippet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
Extended exercises snippet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Updating tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
3 Porting content to a new structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33

Contents
Course materials may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the prior written permission of IBM.
iv Course title, shortened if necessary © Copyright IBM Corp. 2012

© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012 5
Overview: converting from Flare to FrameMaker
This document is intended primarily to formalize and record the process of converting a Flare
project to an equivalent set of FrameMaker documents, including the reformatting of that output
using the departmental FrameMaker "Astrid" template, ultimately for either the export of PDFs from
FrameMaker or the conversion of the FrameMaker document set into other deliverables using
RoboHelp.
While the principal intention is to lay out the specific Flare-to-FrameMaker process, previous
experience converting from other authoring environments, such as Word, to FrameMaker suggests
to me that many of the processes here could be useful to others converting from systems other
than Flare with some adaptations and variations on the process laid out here.
A brief overview of FrameMaker
This is intended for those unfamiliar with FrameMaker and how it organizes content.
The central organizing element of a FrameMaker project is the book file (which ends with the .book
extension). You can think of it as an empty shell with a set of general rules for organizing the
content you put into it. The content is the FrameMaker files (ending in the .fm extension) and any
files generated from them (typically the table of contents and index, but sometimes lists of figures,

A brief overview of FrameMaker
6 Course title, shortened if necessary © Copyright IBM Corp. 2012
tables, glossaries, etc.). The .fm files contain the actual authored content, as well as
cross-references both internal to themselves and to one another, or even to other files; and content
imported from other files, such as text imported from other files and external graphics.
FrameMaker content files can be as granular or as inclusive as you like. They tend to fall in the
middle ground between Word files, which tend to be large, single files containing everything, and
Flare files, which organize modules by myriad small topic HTML files. Typically, an .fm file will
represent a chapter of something, which would be roughly equivalent to a module in Flare; though,
again, it does not have to be built at precisely this scale, but it is advisable. For Flare users, such as
those of us at Clarity, this implies taking the output from the Flare-to-FrameMaker conversion
process and combining the content from the numerous topic files into a handful of chapter files.
However, for Word users, for whom the entire book tends to be a single file, the reverse process
may be advisable: breaking the single file down into individual chapter documents (typically, broken
at the top level entries of your Word document TOC).
It is possible to nest the contents of one book file within another. This is typically done when
sectional TOCs are required. The content for the section is built into, and controlled from, a book
file for that section, for which that book produces a table of contents. The files from that book,
including the TOC (which is a "generated" file) can be brought into the book file for the entire
project, which controls the overall table of contents across the whole project. This isn't something
that touches on Clarity content, but may be more critical to the way other departments have
managed their content.
This is the structure of the document you are currently reading:

Overview of the conversion process within FrameMaker
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2012 Student Exercises 7
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Despite the fact that the processes listed here may not be completely applicable to the conversion
process of every department, nevertheless you may find some instruction in the process here
generally, if not actually specifically. For example, FrameMaker is adept at importing Word content,
but it also imports the paragraph styles at the same time, and so the second part of this process
may be illustrative to anyone involved in moving from Word as their authoring environment to
FrameMaker.
Task 1. Converting from Flare
The FrameMaker output from a Flare project mirrors its structure. This is to say that the topics that
make up a module are each converted to a separate .fm file, more or less automatically. For the
purposes of moving forward in FrameMaker, it is easier to work with this content as a single unified
file combining all the topics of a module into a single chapter that is equal to the entire module.
Therefore, the first part of the process involves the consolidation of the topics of each module into a
single file; one such file for each module in the Flare project. In other words, a Flare project with five
modules (made up of, say, 40-50 HTML topic files) will become a FrameMaker book with five
chapters.
Task 2. Reformatting the FrameMaker output
The second part of the process involves importing the various settings of the FrameMaker template
(called "Astrid", which is used in this document) into the FrameMaker chapters you've
concatenated, and then applying them to the files. These settings are things like paragraph styles,
table styles, variables, page layouts, master pages, and so on. Some of this work is manual and a
bit plodding, but much of it can be automated and only has to be done once. This is where most of
the work of actually converting the project will occur.
Task 3. Porting to a clean FrameMaker structure
The last part of the process involves taking the converted content and, essentially, cutting and
pasting it into clean, empty .fm files created from the template. While not strictly necessary, this
work is strong advisable regardless of the authoring environment you used previously. FrameMaker
is good at importing and applying styles from Word and other authoring environments, and these
contaminants can persist and even propagate across and between projects literally for years if
they're allowed to. This last step eliminates most, and hopefully all, of such extraneous styles from
the content moving forward.

1 Converting from Flare
Preliminary preparation
This assumes that Technical Communicator Suite 4 is installed on your computer.
Important: It's necessary, for handshaking between Flare and FrameMaker 11, for Flare to be
version 8. If you're using Flare 7.x, you must upgrade to Flare 8. Further, there are a handful of
files that must be manually updated in Flare for it to work properly. If these steps are necessary for
your process, please consult with Andy Sutherland (asutherland@ca.ibm.com).
Specific to Clarity projects, in order to avoid errors during the conversion process, it is necessary to
take the following steps:
1. Open the project you want to convert.
2. In the Content Explorer tab, expand the TOCs folder.
3. Double-click the TOC you intent to export. The TOC opens.
4. Right-click the Title topic in the TOC and select Properties.
5. In the Properties dialog, change the Page Type drop-down menu setting from Title to First.

Conversion process
6. Click OK.
7. Save the changes.
Conversion process
Now that the groundwork has been done, you can go ahead and actually have Flare and
FrameMaker do the work of converting your Flare project to an equivalent set of FrameMaker
documents. To do so, follow these steps.
1. Open the project you want to convert to FrameMaker in Flare 8.
2. Select the Project Organizer tab.
3. Expand the Targets folder.
4. Right-click the Targets folder and select Add Target.

Conversion process
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5. Set the Output Type drop-down menu to FrameMaker and enter FrameMaker as the File
Name. Click Add.
6. Click OK. The FrameMaker target is created and displayed.
7. In the FrameMaker target, if there are more than one TOC, click the General tab and use the
Master TOC drop-down menu to select the TOC you want to export to FrameMaker.
8. Select the Advanced tab.
9. In Output Options, Generate resized copies of scaled images is selected by default.
Deselect this option (otherwise, reduced versions of any scaled images will be generated and
used in the FrameMaker output files, compromising legibility and limiting your options for
changing their scale).

Conversion process
10. Click the Build button. The process of converting your project to FrameMaker file output
begins.
Note: Keep an eye out for nested table export errors. Extended Exercise snippets in Clarity
documentation in particular depend on nested tables, which are not supported in FrameMaker.
Provision will have to be made for recording which exercises include such information so that it
can be added manually.
11. When the process completes, click Open Output Folder. The folder with the project exported
as new FrameMaker files (book and topics, as well as Resources for externalized references)
opens in Explorer.

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12. You can now close Flare.

Conversion process

2 Working with the FrameMaker files
Concatenating the chapter documents
The preparation for applying the new template involves first taking the output FrameMaker files
from your converted process and combining them into single chapter files. For each former module,
this requires copying the name of the module from the old module file, pasting that into the head of
the first topic file, and changing the name of that topic file to the name of the former module. This
first topic file will be built into the chapter file that contains all the information of the module in the
Flare project, after which the other topic files can be removed from the book and discarded.
The file immediately following one is the first topic in the module, and will be the file that will be used
to combine all the other topics, becoming the chapter file that replaces the Flare module. In the
illustration, the circled files are the module headers containing the name of the module that will
become the name of the chapter file. The files following them (in this case,
Cube_Manager_Overview.fm and Generating_an_Audit.fm) will become the chapter files in this
book. Nearly all the rest of the files will have their content moved to those chapter files, and then be
removed from the book.

Important: Before starting, I recommend selecting View > Show borders and View > Show
text symbols. This aids considerably in the editing process.
1. First, open all the topic files by double-clicking their names in the book file panel and identify
which ones are module header files, containing only the names of Flare modules and no other
content. Make a note of them. Then close all the topic files.
2. Open the first file composed of a module name header.
3. Copy the text that names the module.
4. Open the file that immediately follows the module name file, which represents the first topic in
the module in the Flare project.
5. Press Enter to create a blank paragraph at the start of the document.
6. Select Edit > Paste Special and select Text. This will paste the name into the paragraph
without copying over any formatting or paragraph styles.

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7. In the book file panel, right-click the topic file you have open and select Rename. Select the
name of the file (everything before ".fm") and type or paste the module name in. FrameMaker
will display an update dialog. Click OK.
8. Move to the very end of the document and press Enter to create a new empty paragraph.
9. Select File > Import.
10. Using the book file panel as your guide, determine which is the next topic file in the module, and
select that file in the dialog. Make sure you select Copy Into Document. Then click OK. Accept
the defaults in the Import Text Flow by Copy dialog by clicking Import. This will import all the

content (including cross-references, references to image files, embedded graphics, and so on)
of that topic into this chapter document.
Repeat this importation process for all the remaining topic files in this module, until you have
imported all the module content into this single chapter file. At that point, you can select each of the
topic files that have been imported, as well as the one containing only the module's name, and
press Delete to remove them from the book. Note that this does not actually delete the .fm file itself;
it only removes it from inclusion in the book file.
When you have completed this part of the process, for a former Clarity Flare project, you should
have only a Title.fm, TOC.fm, and Index.fm file, as well as one .fm chapter file for each former
module in the project.

Importing and applying the new template formats
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FrameMaker has the facility to import a number of formats from any FrameMaker document into
another in a single process. This includes paragraph and character styles, table formats, variable
definitions, colour definitions, and page layouts and master pages, among others. It also enables
the rapid remapping of one style to another by a global replace process. This doesn't do all our
reformatting work for us, but it gets the easy changes, which represents the bulk of the reformatting
to be done, out of the way more quickly and easily than doing so manually.
The process here involves opening a copy of a typical Astrid document and importing its formats
into the chapter documents contained here, and then applying those styles to our existing content.
It's less important to do this for the generated files because we will be physically replacing them
using files from the template.
Importing the new formats
1. Select File > Open. Navigate to any typical Astrid .fm document and select it. Click OK.
2. When the Astrid content document opens in FrameMaker, control-click the chapter documents
in your book file to select them all.
3. Select File > Import > Formats.

4. When the Import Formats dialog opens, ensure the Import from Document drop-down menu
displays the name of the Astrid file. By default, all import options are selected. Accept the
default selections and click Import.
When the import procedure is completed, the dialog will close. You can close the Astrid file at this
point.
Applying the new formats
Now we have chapter files that have a full complement of styles, formats, and other settings
inherited from Flare, and a new set of styles, formats and settings import from the new template.
We want to convert our content from the old formats to the new.
This is where most of the real work takes place. We need to thoroughly track down all paragraphs,
snippets, and tables using our old formats, and reformat them using the new styles. Any element
with an old format we don't change will bring its formatting with it into the new documents we will
prepare later, and that carries with it the risk that extraneous styles and settings will move forward

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where they don't belong, possibly even to other departments since one of the ideas here is to
facilitate shared content.
Fortunately, as indicated earlier, much of this effort can be done automatically, and since we
depended on only a handful of paragraph styles for the vast majority of our work, a great deal of the
conversion can be done quickly and thoroughly, using the global update options command.
Paragraph formats
Module name headers
You will recall that one of the things we did in concatenating our chapter files was to copy the
module name into the very start of the file. Since this only occurs once per chapter, there's no point
to run a global replace function on it.
1. Go to the start of the file.
2. Click on the first line, which should be the module name, now the name of the chapter, to place
the cursor on that line.
Notice that at the upper right corner of the FrameMaker interface is a drop-down list of
paragraph styles.
3. Ensuring that the cursor is in the chapter title line, click on the paragraph styles drop-down list
and select the paragraph style h1 .
The text will become large, grey-blue lettering capped with multi-colour graphics automatically
associated with this paragraph format.

Remember to do this for each chapter document. FrameMaker will identify this paragraph style
when building the table of contents and use it to insert a reference to this chapter in the TOC with
an appropriate level designation.
Auto-mapping old paragraph styles to new
Most of the text content of a Clarity Flare topic is made up of about half-a-dozen or so paragraph
styles; body text, numbered and bulleted lists, headers of various levels, and table text styles. We
can quickly identify the most commonly-used paragraph styles and then the new styles each should
be mapped to, and then proceed to use the global update command to convert all paragraphs of a
given style in the chapter to another we designate.
The following steps are an example of how to use the global update command. This will be followed
by a table indicating which new format each old format should be mapped to, using the process
explained here.
1. Locate the Paragraph Designer panel. This is typically found in the lower right of the
application window. If you cannot locate it, you can evoke it by selecting Window > Panels >
Paragraph Designer.
2. In the Paragraph Tag drop-down list at the top of the panel, choose the target style. This would
be the Astrid style you want to convert a legacy paragraph style to.
3. Click the downward arrow button beside Commands at the bottom left of the panel.
4. Select Global Update Options.

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The Global Update Options dialog opens.
5. In the Global Update Options, we need to change some of the defaults. At the top, select All
Properties, and at the bottom, the All Tagged option. Use the All Tagged drop-down list to
select the old legacy format brought in from Flare that you want to convert to the new format
you selected at the top of the Paragraph Designer panel.
6. Click Update. A dialog will prompt you to ensure you want to change all paragraphs tagged with
the old style to the new. Take a moment to ensure you have made the right selections, and if so,
click OK.
The format of all paragraphs of the designated old style are updated to the new style.

Note that some, if not all, of the graphics in the chapter may be displaced by this process. Don't be
too concerned by this for now. Properly placing the imported graphics is a separate sweep we will
undertake once the bulk updating of paragraph styles is accomplished.
Perform this process for each of the following old style-new style paragraph pairs.
Table 1. Mapped paragraph styles
To convert Flare style: ...select Astrid style:
p p0
p_Body p0
p_NumberedIndent p1
li_Disc lui1
li_Numbered lol1n
h1_section h1u
h1_noSectionNumber h1
h1_index h1
h1_appendix h1
h2_Exercise h2top (afterward set first heading 2 instance to h2)
h2_noExcerciseNumber h2top (afterward set first heading 2 instance to h2)
h4_Tasks h3
h4_MiscHeading h3
th_TableStyle_RowHeader_Head_0_0_RowSep_C
olEnd
TblColHead
th_TableStyle_RowHeader_Head_0_0_RowSep_C
olSep
TblColHead
td_TableStyle_RowHeader_Body_0_0_RowEnd_C
olEnd
TblBody
td_TableStyle_RowHeader_Body_0_0_RowEnd_C
olSep
TblBody
td_TableStyle_RowHeader_Body_0_0_RowSep_C
olEnd
TblBody

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There are a couple of caveats here. One is that since Flare and FrameMaker have different
mechanisms for managing number lists, you will have to make a note of where numbered lists
began previously, because when all the lists are converted to the lol1n style, all the lists in the
document will be treated as a continuation of a single list. You have to identify which points were
previously #1 for a particular list, place the cursor in that paragraph, and use the paragraph
drop-down list to set that paragraph to lol1. That will set that paragraph to #1 in the list, and all the
points after it will be renumbered in accordance with it.
Another is that because of the explanation tables that head each Astrid chapter, we no longer need
the snippets that outline objectives, nor the Description and Instruction headers. The information in
the Objectives snippets is transferred to the Astrid header table, and the Description and Instruction
headers can simply be deleted.
Resetting the images
Because of some differences in how Flare and FrameMaker deal with the placement of referenced
images, one of the manual tasks we face in rectifying our documentation is the re-registration of the
illustrations we use. While a relatively simple process, it has to be done one image at a time, and
obviously, across dozens of chapters and over a dozen projects, this is going to take some time.
A quick note on how an an image is "hung" in FrameMaker. Typically it is placed inside what is
called an anchored frame, which is a container for an image or other object that, depending on the
settings you choose for it, will interact with the text in various ways. What the frame is "anchored" to
is a paragraph. The paragraph style we'll be using is one called z_anchorS. It's a paragraph set to
an extremely small point size, and the idea there is to create an anchoring paragraph style that will
disrupt the flow of text as little as possible while facilitating the placement of graphics throughout
the flow.
The process for re-registering an image in FrameMaker is as follows.
1. Locate the image you want to re-register.
2. Since Clarity graphics were typically set on paragraphs set to p_NumberedIndent, which have
now all be changed to p1, we need to manually change the paragraph a graphic is set on. Place
the cursor on the line the graphic is anchored to and used the paragraph style drop-down menu
to set it to z_anchorS.
td_TableStyle_RowHeader_Body_0_0_RowSep_C
olSep
TblBody
(any bulleted styles within a table) TblBullet
Table 1. Mapped paragraph styles
To convert Flare style: ...select Astrid style:

3. If you don’t have see the Anchored Frame panel already open, click on the border of the
anchored frame (not the graphic inside it) to select it, then right-click the border and select
Anchored Frame. The Anchored Frame panel opens.
4. In the Anchored Frame panel, set the Anchoring Position drop-down list to Below Current
Line and the Alignment drop-down list to Center; then click Edit Frame.This will properly
reposition the graphic.
Repeat this process for all the graphics in the chapter that are in the flow of the text (that is to say,
not page layout elements found in of headers, footers, side heads; or images displayed in table
cells).
Placing a new image
If you should have need of actually bringing a new image into the project—for example, bringing in
exports of PowerPoint slides—this section will explain how.
A major issue in importing graphics is to decide if they will be referenced—that is, remain separate
files outside the documents that are “called into” the document whenever it’s opened or exported to
another format—or embedded, which is when a graphic is actually brought into the document
permanently.
The advantages of referenced graphics is that they don’t bloat the size of the documents, which
makes them easier to work with, faster to save, and so on. It also means that several different
documents can all reference the same graphics, and that any time you amend or update one of
those graphics, it will automatically be updated in any document referencing it. The disadvantage is
that the references mean that you cannot move either the referencing document or the graphic
relative to one other in the directory structure, for FrameMaker will “lose” the location and be unable
to bring the graphics into the document when you open it (although you can fairly easily update
these links en masse by directing FrameMaker to the new location when it prompts you to locate
the “missing” graphics).
The principle advantage of embedding graphics is that they never get “lost”. They make the
documents more portable. However, they bloat the size of the documents, slow down updates and

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disk operations, and mean that different documents can’t share the same graphics. It also makes
updating graphics far more burdensome.
In general, it’s preferable to go with the referenced model.
To import a graphic, follow these steps.
1. Create a new blank paragraph where you want the graphic to be displayed.
2. Set the paragraph style to z_anchorS.
3. Select File > Import > File. The Import dialog opens.
4. Navigate to the graphic you want to import and select it. Select Import By Reference.
5. Click Import. The graphic appears in a centred anchored frame.
6. Press Esc M P, in that order. This “shrink-wraps” the anchored frame to the image to save
space. Unfortunately, it will also dislocate the image again.
7. If you don’t have see the Anchored Frame panel already open, click on the border of the
anchored frame (not the graphic inside it) to select it, then right-click the border and select
Anchored Frame. The Anchored Frame panel opens.
8. In the Anchored Frame panel, set the Anchoring Position drop-down list to Below Current
Line and the Alignment drop-down list to Center; then click Edit Frame.This will properly
reposition the graphic.

Dealing with snippets
We use a number of "snippets" in our Flare documentation. Many of these have equivalent formats
in Astrid. Some are made superfluous.
Objectives snippet
We no longer require this snippet. Here is what to do with them.
1. From any Astrid general document, locate the descriptive table at the start of the chapter.
2. Placing the cursor in the upper-leftmost cell, click-drag to the lower-rightmost cell to select all
the cells in the table, then press CTRL+C to copy them.
3. At the beginning of your chapter document, below the chapter title, create a new empty
paragraph.
4. Set the paragraph to style z_anchorS.
5. Press CTRL+V to paste the table onto the anchor paragraph.
6. Go to your objectives snippet and copy the bullet pointed text from the objectives snippet.
7. Return to the descriptive table you just pasted at the head of your chapter.
8. Delete any superfluous bullet points from the objectives section.
9. With the cursor active in that section, select Edit > Paste special.
10. Select Text and click OK.
11. If the points you just pasted into place do not already have the style TblBullet, select them and
set them to that style.
If you have more objective snippets with content to place here, you might add a few empty
bullet points so that when you Paste special their contents here, they'll automatically have the
right paragraph style.
12. Return to the empty objectives snippet and drag-select its two cells.

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13. Press Delete. When prompted, select Remove cells from table and click OK.
14. Delete the empty paragraph.
Do this for all the objectives snippets in the chapter.
Notes snippet
These can be replaced by the equivalent notes format in the Astrid template. However, there is also
an “important” style that might be a better fit for some notes from Flare. Keep this possibility in mind
when you're replacing them.
Here is the process for converting them.
1. Select the first paragraph of text inside the note cell and using the paragraph style drop-down
list, set it to note (or, if you feel it is more appropriate to the content, set it to important).
If there are other, subsequent paragraphs sharing the cell, go to the end of the previous
paragraph and press Delete twice to remove the space between the two paragraphs.
Press Shift+Enter twice. Do this for any other remaining paragraphs.
2. When all the paragraphs have been united and spaced, select them all and press CTRL+X to
cut them.
3. Create a new empty paragraph above the empty notes snippet.
4. Press CTRL+V to paste the new note into place.
5. Delete the empty note snippet and any empty paragraphs.
Best practices snippet
There's no exact equivalent in the Astrid template; however, the “hint” format would probably serve
well for our purposes.
Here is the process for converting them.
1. Select the first paragraph of text inside the best practices cell and using the paragraph style
drop-down list, set it to hint.
If there are other, subsequent paragraphs sharing the cell, go to the end of the previous
paragraph and press Delete twice to remove the space between the two paragraphs.
Press Shift+Enter twice. Do this for any other remaining paragraphs.
2. When all the paragraphs have been united and spaced, select them all and press CTRL+X to
cut them.
3. Create a new empty paragraph above the empty best practices snippet.
4. Press CTRL+V to paste the new hint format into place.

5. Delete the empty best practices snippet and any empty paragraphs.
Extended exercises snippet
There is no parallel form for this in the Astrid template. Here is the suggested treatment.
1. Above the extended exercises snippet, create two new empty paragraphs. Set the first to the h3
style and type Extended exercise on the line.
2. Set the style of the second empty paragraph to p0.
3. Copy the contents of the extended exercise snippet and Paste special (select Text) it into the
p0 paragraph. Format the text (bullet points, numbered lists) as necessary.
4. Delete the extended exercise snippet and any empty paragraphs.
Updating tables
Unfortunately one of the really tough manual jobs we have to do is rebuild the tables.
1. Make a note of how many columns there are in the table you want to convert.
2. Also make a note of any cells that contain more than one paragraph. For these cells, delete the
paragraph marker to combine the two paragraphs, and press Shift+Enter twice to separate
them. FrameMaker will treat them as a single paragraph. This is important for rebuilding the
table, as FrameMaker will key on the number of paragraphs to create the rows properly.
3. Drag-select all the cells in the table.
4. Select Table > Convert to Paragraphs. The Convert to Paragraphs dialog opens.
5. Select Row by Row and click Convert. Your table is now converted to a list of regular text.
6. Select all the paragraphs just exported from the table.
7. Select Table > Convert to Table. The Convert to Table dialog opens.
8. For the purposes of most of our tables, setting the Table Format to Tbl_3c No Title is
appropriate.
9. If your table had a heading row, ensure Heading Rows is set to 1.

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10. For Treat Each Paragraph As, select A Cell, and set the Number of Columns to the number
you took note of before converting.
11. Click Convert. Your text is now rebuilt as an Astrid-format table, with the text reformatted to the
appropriate styles.
12. Check to ensure the layout of the table in terms of headers, columns, and cells is the same after
conversion as it was before. If not, undo, and correct your settings.
You may need to resize the columns, as they may extend off the page. To do this, follow these
steps:
1. Select as many of the columns as are visible.
2. Right-click the selected cells and select Resize Columns. The Resize Selected Columns
dialog opens.
3. Select By Scaling to Widths Totaling and set the value to 3”.
4. Click Resize. This will reduce all the selected cells to a total width of three inches. This should
make all the columns visible. If not, select as many as are and repeat the process until all
columns are visible.
5. Once all the cells are visible, you will be able to set their final widths.
• To set all the columns to the same width, enter a value of 6.658" (the total width of the text
area in the Astrid template) in the By Scaling to Widths Totaling field. You can enter
smaller values if you don’t require a table that actually spans the entire page.
• To manually resize a column, select at least one cell in it, and move the cursor to the right
side of the selection over the black square drag handles until the cursor appears as a small
black left-pointing arrow. Use it to click-drag the column to your preferred width.

3 Porting content to a new structure
Strictly speaking, it is possible to move forward working with the structure we've just created.
However, it involves very strictly removing old vestiges of styles and formats and leaving only what
was brought in from the corporate template. In my experience in converting from one template to
another in FrameMaker, I've learned to consider it advisable to do the reformatting in the original
documents, and then port that content over to a clean set of documents prepared from the new
template.
The basic process goes as follows:
1. Determine how many chapter documents you will need.
2. Using the Astrid template, create a new directory (named for your project) and copy the Astrid
book, TOC, and at least one ordinary chapter file.
3. Duplicate the chapter file to match the number of chapters in your converted project.
4. Rename to book file as to easily identify the project. Rename the TOC file the same, leaving the
TOC suffix.
5. Rename the chapters in accord with the chapters in your conversion effort.
6. One at a time, open a chapter from your conversion effort, and then the blank parallel chapter in
the clean project.
7. In the conversion chapter, with the cursor active anywhere in the main text flow, press CTRL+A
to select everything in the text flow, and then CTRL+C to copy it. I recommend this, as opposed
to using any kind of import process between files, since it only brings over what is necessary,
and this limits the risk of bringing over extraneous formats, which is what we want to avoid and
the whole point of this additional process.
8. With the cursor active at the head of the chapter you're porting too, press CTRL+A to select
everything in the text flow, and then press Delete to remove it. Press CTRL+V to paste your
content into the new chapter.
Important: You can skip the delete step, but it's advisable not to, since in performing it you will
know for sure you're not leaving anything superfluous from the Astrid placeholder content (tables,
stray sentences, etc.) behind in your new document.

9. Save and close the new chapter. Close the old chapter.
Repeat this process for each chapter with content. There's no need to do this for the TOC, however,
since that's a generated file and FrameMaker itself will repopulate it when the book file is
regenerated.
It appears that most of the variables used for the Astrid template are used in the TOC file to express
the project's identity on the front cover, though some are used throughout the book. To evoke the
Variables tab, either select Special > Variables or double-click any embedded variable in any file
(the name of the course on the first page of the TOC file, for example). From here, you can
single-click each variable to select it (don't double-click, though; that embeds that variable wherever
the cursor is in the body text). Clicking the Edit button, third from the left, in the Variables tab will
enable you to edit that variable's definition.
Variables you should set in the TOC file:
• #copyyear
• #coursecode
• #coursetitle1
• #edition
• #shortcoursetitle
• #version

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Once you've set the variables and made sure they appear in the TOC, you can select the other files
in the book file and select File > Import > Formats. Click the Deselect All button to clear the
selections, and then fill the check box for Variable Definitions alone. Ensure the TOC document
name appears in the Import from Document drop-down menu and then click Import. All the
variables will be propagated in the other files for use by them, if necessary. You should do this
whenever you update the variables in the TOC file for the book.
After that, it should be a matter of clicking the Update Book button at the top of the book tab to
update the variables in the headers and footers and the contents of the TOC. Select File > Save as
PDF, and then examine your PDF file to assure it is as you want it. Odds are you'll have to go back
and do some tweaking, but by now most of the real work should be done, and you will have a
system for this particular course that you can move forward with, either in FrameMaker or
RoboHelp.

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