Finding and fixing paragraph overrides in FrameMaker 10

April 5, 2011

Locating overrides

While teaching a FrameMaker 10 class today, I was reminded that the Find/Change feature now includes the option to search for Paragraph Character and Table format overrides. This is a great way to identify inconsistencies in your document’s formatting.

The option to search for overrides is new to FrameMaker 10, but for those of you not yet using FrameMaker 10, you can still easily remove formatting inconsistencies in any version of FrameMaker (or at least back to Frame 5.0!)

Removing overrides from a document

Savvy FrameMaker users and workgroups will have a template ready to update formatting (and thus have the chance to remove overrides in the process).

So what if you haven’t gotten your template workflow established? You can still remove overrides automatically, resetting any paragraph and other formats back to the definitions in your current document’s catalogs.

Choose File > Import > Formats, but instead of identifying a file from which to import, simply leave the Import from Document option set to Current.

Next, select the While Updating, Remove checkboxes for both Manual Page Breaks and Other Format/Layout Overrides. Now, when you select Import, the net result is that the catalogs are “replaced” with themselves, but any overrides within the documents are automatically removed!

What are your favorite FrameMaker “secret” techniques?