🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi

I'm rather new to FrameMaker (rather less new to XML) and I'm trying to take an existing application which uses XML sources, and move to structured FM as the editing tool.

This is a question about character/paragraph formatting. For a simple example consider a list. In the absence of other markup the list items should be given the same font/format as simple paragraphs, with the addition of a sequence number (or bullet point) and an indent. The sequence number should be set to 1 for the first list item, and be incremented for subsequent items.

Now all this intelligence can be added explicitly to the EDD with context-based rules for paragraph formatting and autonumbering, etc. etc. On the other hand much of it can be applied by means of formats stored in the paragraph catalog.

It is apparently possible to ignore the paragraph and character format catalogs and place all formatting in EDD rules; alternatively it is possible to place all formatting in catalogs and simply pick the appropriate formats from the catalog inside context specifications. In our very simple list example this means at least three separate paragraph formats: bulleted_list_item, first_numbered_list_item, numbered_list_item.

I can see the value in storing a format in a catalog - you can import it into other documents, edit it in one place, etc. - but the catalog definition has no conditional logic in it, so all the context specifications remain in the EDD, and the catalog contains a myriad of formats, correlating with the number of contextual variants in the document structure - which in any sophisticated schema could be very large indeed.

Well, after this long preamble, I have two questions:

1) is there scope for conditional logic in the catalog after all, i.e. have I missed some enabling feature that keeps the number of catalog entries down to manageable proportions?

2) do you, as experienced hands, have any helpful advice as to the "best practices" for deciding between EDD-based and template/catalog-based formatting?

Thanks
T