Lesson 1

In this lesson, you’ll learn how FrameMaker gained popularity, was the foundation for a highly successful company, and then almost died due to marketing mistakes. Now considered the “gold standard” of desktop publishing for technical writers, FrameMaker carries a mystique all its own. By the end of this lesson, you’ll understand why FrameMaker looks different than many Windows-based applications, know how to set up your FrameMaker workspace and open new documents, and learn that behind the mystique and complexity, FrameMaker is an application that you can master.

Lesson 2

In this lesson, you’ll learn that FrameMaker’s master pages are easier to understand and create than you may have thought. You’ll also learn the standard work flow for creating documentation, and how FrameMaker fits into it. You’ll have a hands-on experience of modifying the text frames so your documents look like you want them to look. You’ll discover the different types of pages that you use in FrameMaker, and what a text flow is. By the end of this lesson, you’ll be adept at creating custom master pages, adding page numbers to your footers, creating a new header, and changing the number of columns in your text frames.

Lesson 3

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use FrameMaker’s paragraph tags, plus while you’re creating some new paragraph tags, you’ll have hands-on experience with a variety of FrameMaker’s formatting options. By the time you complete this lesson, you’ll understand how paragraph and character tags work, and be able to create new paragraph tags of your own. You’ll know the shortcuts to find the paragraph tags that you want, and have a clearer understanding of all of the options you can choose when creating and using paragraph and character tags.

Lesson 4

In this lesson, you’ll create and work with tables. You’ll also have fun sorting table rows, adding and deleting rows, learning about something called “straddling”, changing the rules in your tables, and adding a bit of color to them. As you explore FrameMaker’s Table Designer, you’ll learn how to create table formats so that all of the tables in your document have the same look and feel. In no time at all, your tables will go from boring to brilliant!

Lesson 5

This lesson is a favorite with many students. In it, you’ll learn how to use FrameMaker’s drawing tools and have fun creating new shapes to use in your documentation. You’ll see that you have a large variety of shapes that you can create, and you can combine them however you wish to make exciting new graphics. You’ll create some basic shapes, and then try your hand at a more difficult (but not as difficult as you might think!) shape, then you’ll add the spice of color to your shapes to make them stand out even more. You’ll learn tips that will enable you to modify your shapes in new ways. Warning! You’ll have so much fun playing with FrameMaker’s drawing tools it could be hazardous to your studies!

Lesson 6

In this information-packed lesson, you’ll learn how to use anchored frames to place your graphics with precision, as well as use these frames to crop and mask your graphics. You’ll learn about the many options FrameMaker has to help you place your graphics more accurately, as well as the different ways you can import graphics into your document and manipulate them to create exactly the look that you want. You’ll download a graphic from the lesson and import it the reference pages of your own document, and then learn how to add it to the list of items you can insert in your document from the Paragraph Designer, giving you bright new options to draw attention to “warnings,” “notes,” and other elements of your documents.

Lesson 7

Have you ever written a large document, and then discovered just before you publish it that you have to change a single word throughout the entire text? Wouldn’t it be great if you could put a piece of code in the header that would automatically display some of the text on that page, even if you change it in the future? Well, FrameMaker’s variables can make all of this and more a snap. Using code that either gets its information from your computer or that you write yourself, you’ll appreciate how variables make it easy to maintain and update those picky details that make your document stand out. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to put the power of variables to work for you, exploring the ins and outs of inserting, modifying, and creating them on your own.

Lesson 8

In this lesson, you’ll learn how to let FrameMaker stay on top of your cross-references – even ones in other documents! You’ll have an up-close and personal experience with creating cross-references as you learn by doing in this lesson. You’ll learn how to modify cross-references, create new ones, and create new formats for your cross-references. And then, just because things can happen, you’ll learn how to troubleshoot your cross-references when things go wrong, and how you can get them back on track quickly.

Lesson 9

This is the lesson that you’ve been waiting for! In it, we talk about “books,” that FrameMaker feature that is largely responsible for its unparalleled reputation for handling large documents. Now entire teams can work on different parts of a document without getting in each others’ way. You can write large documents without so much fear of document corruption. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to create book files, and then to add documents to them. You’ll have another hands-on experience as you create a book of your own, and then create page numbers that span several documents without missing a beat, spell-check all of the documents in your book at one time, find and replace whatever you want in your book at one time, and change the formatting of the documents in your book with a single step – even if your book contains hundreds of files!

Lesson 10

In this lesson, you’ll create tables of content, and then you’ll learn how to format it using your Paragraph Designer and your reference pages. Although creating tables of contents takes a bit of time in FrameMaker, the upside is that once you have developed a template, you can use it for all of your documents. Learn these things and other tips about FrameMaker tables of contents in this lesson!

Lesson 11

In this lesson, you’ll learn about indexing conventions, and how to generate an index from a document that you’ll download. After you’ve generated your index, you’ll learn how to format it to make it look exactly as you wish. Indexing never was easier!

Lesson 12

In this lesson, you’ll learn about the three most common ways that technical writers publish their documentation. You’ll learn how to print hard copies on the printer attached to your computer, publish your document as in Portable Document Format (PDF) so it can be read by anyone with a computer, and how to publish your document as HTML to put on your company’s intranet. You even can publish the same document as all three! Unleash the power of your words with more publishing options than you thought possible.