🚀 go-pugleaf

Trevor,

As you have probably deduced from the first two responses, this is a complex topic with no simple answers. The best approach for a particular instance will vary depending on many factors, particularly your needed output formats.

Our own solution lands somewhere in between Russ's and Ruud's approaches.

One of our primary reasons for moving to structured from unstructured Framemaker was that our templates had gotten completely out of control, with over 100 paragraph formats in use and consistency nearly impossible to determine, much less enforce.

On the other hand, moving all formatting to the EDD was not really an option for a couple of reasons:
1. Many of our documents need to be made available in RTF format with styles in use.
2. Our PDF output needs to be fully tagged, and at this time, Framemaker still uses paragraph formats to create the structure in tagged PDFs (A significant oversight that I hope will be addressed in a future release).

Our final solution uses about 10 paragraph formats and a 75 page EDD. Hopefully your own situation is much less complex.

To illustrate this hybrid approach using your question: Our template has contains a paragraph format named List that is used for lists of all types, with bulleting/numbering applied via attributes and format rules.

Note that while the use of paragraph formats might be debatable, character formats are still indispensable, particularly for things like autonumbering.

I do hope to hear more opinions on this issue. While the system we have in place is working well, I always see room for improvement.

Oliver John