Elements default format appear as blocks instead of inline text

Question

I am creating an EDD and I have some issues with the way FrameMaker breaks each element instead of leaving it inline. This wouldn't be a problem if I was allowed to format children instead of elements; then I could fix the problems I am having.
Short question is, is there a way to tell FrameMaker to open unformatted elements inline instead of as blocks?
For instance, I have acronym elements within the text that wrap the definition and then wrap the term. When formatting it, it must show up as text and then the acronym after it with parentheses around it. I was able to make that happen by using run-ins, but the acronym element itself is no longer a part of the para. It is broken down to its own paragraph.
Example: <para>Reference will be made to the <acronym><def>Air Force</def><term>AF</term></acronym> serial number.</para>
should look like this:
Reference will be made to the Air Force (AF) serial number.
but instead looks like this:
Reference will be made to the
Air Force (AF) serial number.
because I can't edit the EDD to have any para element with an acronym within it to format as a run-in.

Answer 1

If you have solved the problem, fine; but let me clarify a few things:
Example: <para>Reference will be made to the <acronym><def>Air Force</def><term>AF</term></acronym> serial number.</para>
I also have <acronym> as a text range and it does not appear inline; it is still blocked as a paragraph.
The FrameMaker EDD rules assume every element is to be formatted as a paragraph unless you tell it otherwise. Giving the acronym element text range formatting (inline) is not enough; you must also set def and term elements to be text range. This is a little bit of a guess on my part, because I have never tried putting paragraph-formatted elements inside a text-range-formatted element.
Regarding the children without parents, the parent is there in the structure view but when typing down through the page view to make sure paragraph tags were placed correctly, some don't appear.
This is still not clear; every element (except the document root element) must have a parent; othewise, the structure is invalid. You see the parent in the structure view, so the parent IS there.
Not every element has to have a paragraph tag associated with it. The typical examples are elements that serve no formatting purpose but simply contain other elements. For example, suppose you have a chapter that has several sections. Each section may have a title element and several paragraph elements. The title element and the paragraph elements are formatted as paragraphs, each with a paragraph tag (if the EDD assigns paragraph tags). The containing section element does not have a paragraph tag; it simply contains the title and paragraph elements.
NOTE that the EDD can assign formatting without assigning a paragraph tag. Maybe this is the cause of your concern. If your EDD is doing this, then some elements will not have tags, even thought the formatting is correct. {CAVEAT: My EDD assigns a default format list to the root element in a document. Except for a very few elements, all formatting is done as overrides to the default tag. In my case, each element displays the same tag, the default tag. I am not sure what happens when NO tag is assigned as the default.}}
I haven't even begun to grasp how I'm going to work out building the
LEP, TOC, LOI, LOT, and Indices yet. I know the build can be done
manually, because I've done it and have templates for that already
(although they are about ten years old).
You likely need not do these lists manually. In a structured document or book, you can create these lists either as lists of paragraph tags (as one does in unstructured documents) or as lists of elements (for example, an LOT is a list of Table elements, if Table is the name of your table element). The elements in the list need not have paragraph tags in the document; typically they do not. See the FrameMaker user manual for details.
Van