In my line of business as an Adobe Certified Trainer, students share all sorts of documents with me both in class and on post-class consultations. One of the things that I see regularly that never fails to make me cringe is the duplication of effort in FrameMaker's Character Catalog. When I see names like BoldBody, BoldFootnote, BoldTable, and BoldBullet, all in the same catalog, I know that the client and I have something to talk about.
The reason people end up making four, five or six versions of a Bold or Italic format is because they simply don't understand how the Character Designer works. In my Introduction to Adobe FrameMaker 8 class, I break up the process into creating Character Formats down into six easy steps (five of them are intuitive; but one is very easy to overlook):
- Select a range of text that you would like to emphasize within a paragraph
- Open Character Designer (you can press [Ctrl] [D]
- Click the Commands drop-down menu from the bottom left of the dialog box and select Set Window to As Is
- Type in a descriptive name (i.e., name the format Bold).
- Select the properties you like to use (i.e., Bold)
- Click the Apply button and then click Create
Voila. The new format appears in the Character Catalog and can be used on any text that needs to have bold type.
What makes my list so special? Step number 3. When you select text in step number 1 and then open the Character Designer, FrameMaker picks up every property from the selected text: typeface, type size, color, tracking (spread), etc. The simple act of setting the window to "As Is" makes the software disregard everything about the selected text, except for what you pick.
Now you can select any text, in any size and use your Bold format. The only thing that will change is the weight: everything else remains as is. Try it, and let me know how it goes.
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About the author: Barbara Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers in the world.