Single sourcing

Question

I use Framemaker 10 and am evaluating the best way for me as the lone writer to set up single sourcing. It looks as if I have two choices: conditional text and text insets. First--is that assumption right?
I read where a writer did not like text insets, which I have used a couple of years ago using structured Frame. That seemed easier to me from my experience, but this writer perferred conditional text.
What are other's experiences? Is one more of a problem than another?
Do I need to use structured Frame, or can I use unstructured?
Thanks
Pam

Answer 1

I'm pretty rusty on structured FM, but IIRC, one or more of the highest-level elements, perhaps doctype, can control the behavior of lower-level elements. I'm not sure the inclusion/exclusion of content, similar to conditional text, is controllaable this way. Lots of folks on this forum can clarify this.
HTH
Regards,
Peter
Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices
jaloren28 wrote:
Hi Pam,
Conditional text and text insets are the two primary tools for single sourcing. You can also share FrameMaker files across books. I do that myself and it works fine as long as you are careful with cross references.
That writer was very confused about the purpose of text insets. Text insets and conditional text are not subsitutes for one another, they are complements to one another. Each one serves a different purpose. You use one, or the other, or both based on the use case.
A text inset is a FrameMaker file that you import by reference into another FrameMaker file. A text inset can contain an arbitrary amount of content that includes but is not limited to text, graphics, and XREFs.
Conditional text is text shown or hidden depending on the audience that sees the content. For example, you may have document that goes to people on Windows OS and Linux OS, so you may apply conditional text to OS specific information. This allows you to  hide Windows content and show Linux content when publishing for the Linux audience.
You use text insets when you want to use the same content in multiple places in a book or books. You use conditional text when you need to publish the same book to different audiences and you need to only show audience specific information. You can for example apply conditional text to a text inset because that single sourced content may only be appropriate for a particular audience.
I personally use all of the above: text insets, conditional text, and sharing framemaker files across books. Personally, I find that conditional text is much more tricky to use based on how it needs to be applied because you can easily show or hide something that you did not intend. Definitely turn on your paragraph marks so you can make sure the conditional text is applied to the paragraph pilcrows.  
I manage a documentation set of 3,000 pages, 40 documents, 2 products, and six product editions. The text insets and conditional text  are good enough for me.
There's nothing about structured FrameMaker that I know of that will help you with single sourcing that unstructured FrameMaker cannot do.