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Selectively "Flowing" Lists into Two Columns on a Single-Column Layout

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I am a one-man Tech Writing department using Structured FrameMaker with a collection of home-brewed EDD's. I create technical documentation for a software product. My documents are currently all single-flow, single-column documents. In the last few releases of our software, some of our feature sets have created the need for long bulleted lists. When it gets to the point where a single bulleted list takes up more than a page (ugly!), it's time to start looking for another way to get the job done. 

 

I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction here. What I'd ideally like to be able to do is set up my "List" element in my EDD with an attribute that will allow me to specify whether or not the list should "wrap" (which I would set manually based on the final length of the list itself.)  I will try to include an example here...hopefully the formatting comes out OK.

 

For example, the following page with this attribute OFF:

 

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Ut a sapien. Aliquam aliquet purus molestie dolor. Integer quis eros ut erat posuere dictum. Curabitur dignissim.

 

* Item 1

* Item 2

* Item 3

* Item 4

* Item 5

* Item 6

 

Integer orci. Fusce vulputate lacus at ipsum. Quisque in libero nec mi laoreet volutpat. Aliquam eros pede, scelerisque quis, tristique cursus, placerat convallis, velit. Nam condimentum. Nulla ut mauris.

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would become the following once that "re-flow" attribute was turned ON:

 

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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Ut a sapien. Aliquam aliquet purus molestie dolor. Integer quis eros ut erat posuere dictum. Curabitur dignissim.

 

* Item 1              * Item 4

* Item 2              * Item 5

* Item 3              * Item 6

 

Integer orci. Fusce vulputate lacus at ipsum. Quisque in libero nec mi laoreet volutpat. Aliquam eros pede, scelerisque quis, tristique cursus, placerat convallis, velit. Nam condimentum. Nulla ut mauris.

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Does anyone know of a way to do this in FrameMaker that doesn't require a bunch of manual fiddling every time you need to add one of these "wrapped" lists? Of course, it doesn't make sense that a shorter list with only a few items would be wrapped in this way...so I need to be able to turn it on and off (even manually) as the list gets longer (although I'm not opposed to using two different element tags for this purpose.)
The best idea I've come up with so far is to use a table without borders, but that feels like a formatting nightmare waiting to happen.
Thanks a million for any and all suggestions -
Brandon Wright
Technical Writer
Management Information Tools, Inc.

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