Re: Not allowed to change templates?

[Tim Altom <taltom -at- IQUEST -dot- NET>]

Kudos for maintaining such standards, but standards are only brakes, not
brick walls. Your department needs some kind of change notice procedure for
making alterations to the standard templates.

Perhaps rather than defending such individual actions and just getting into
a spitting contest, you need to move the focus of the discussion to a
proposal for a change request process. That distracts the original argument
and lays the groundwork for a much-needed addition.

Unless your paragraph tags are in danger of multiplying like rabbits, I
think you can safely add them to the general templates and just let them
hang there until needed. If the other users don't need those tags, they just
don't apply them. It's not like they're going to corrupt or impede anything.


>Our (big) department has a standard set of FrameMaker templates, and we are
>"NOT" allowed to change them. Now we're writing a department style guide,
>and found e.g. that there is no paragraph tag for a literature list, and no
>xref format for referencing the list items, like [1]. Of course we created
>these formats (plus some others), and now we have to defend our decision.
>How did others handle the need for special-purpose formats in a rigid
>environment?
>
>Thanks & regards,
>Gerd Ballenberger
>
Tim Altom
Simply Written, Inc.
317.899.5882
http://www.simplywritten.com
Creators of the Clustar Method for task-based documentation