My department at work is looking to transition most of our files from Word to Structured Framemaker 9 (with an eye to DITA). I am trying to build a master template for this, and running into some numbering woes. I am fairly new to FM, so I'm hoping that there is an obvious solution to this issue, and it is just my inexperience standing in the way.
Currently, documents that we do manage in framemaker are books which contain different files:
1. Front Matter File
2. TOC file
3. First subject of the document
4. Second subject of the document
5. Etc.
In the template, I have created the top level style as "Chapter" and set chapter numbering to continue from previous file in the book. To me, this is the most obvious way to get FM to treat the top level (only) as continued across files. Historically, the department has just maintained seperate templates for each type of file in the book (i.e., Front Matter Template, First Subject Template, Second Subject (and beyond) Template, etc.). Because I don't envy the thought of creating and maintaining multiple structured templates with multiple EDDs to go with them, I have consolidated the templates into one master template that contains all the styles needed for whatever part of the document we are working with.
My issues are:
1. My team lead would like to abolish the use of the Chapter style in our books, and instead use Heading 1 as the top level in a book. Because we will be doing a lot of importing from Word, and all of our Word docs have H1 as the top level, she does not wish to have to bump all the Headings down in order to accomodate a new Chapter level on top after we import. If this is the best way to go, then how can I tell FM to continue numbering for only H1 across files? Can I just use the <chapnum$> variable in the Heading 1 style for numbering and get away with abolishing the use of any other chapter designation?
2. I believe it makes the most sense to set the template to continue numbering for the chapter variable from previous file in the book, since that is the most common scenario. Then, I can reset the first chapter in the book (manually) to start numbering at 1. Is there any compelling reason not to do this? Will this cause any issues when we go to update a book, provided that we make sure to set the numbering for that first chapter file correctly? I hear that there is a way to set numbering properties for an entire book, but I cannot seem to find this feature - only setting numbering for files within a book.
Thanks,
Hannah