Milan Davidovic wrote: > The way I've been "brought up" as a Frame user was to avoid overrides > wherever possible. I'm now working with a writer who is much more > liberal about overrides than I am. We currently work only on > unstructured Frame documents; output is PDF (to print from or for use > onscreen). Right now, we're the only two writers working on the doc > set in question. > > Have any of you been on either side of such a difference in approach, > and how did you go about resolving it?
First question: Who's in charge? There are many good reasons for adhering to a template. But the first thing to determine is whether you (a) are empowered to _tell_ the other writer not to deviate from the template, (b) must _persuade_ the other writer, or (c) must appeal this issue to a third person. Second question: Who owns the template? The template owner should look at the kinds of overrides the other writer is applying and determine if some of them result from an outage in the template or from a failure of the writer to understand how to use it. Third question: How important is this to you and to the company? If you're in charge, of course, it doesn't have to be all that important. You say, "This is how I want you to do things," and that's that. A preference is all you need. If it's someone else, how hard are you willing to work to win the decision-maker over to your way of doing things? Also, you have to consider where the company is in its life cycle, and how long these docs are likely to be around (because overrides are less important in short-lived, throwaway docs, and much more of a pain in docs that will see lots of revisions and maintenance). You may decide it's not worth fighting over, or you may decide that now's the time to draw the line in the sand. Personally, I wouldn't be happy for long in a situation such as you describe. If my carefully crafted templates were routinely disregarded and overridden, and there was nothing I could do about it, I'd have to make some kind of change -- different project, co-worker, or company. But that's me. YMMV. Richard Richard G. Combs Senior Technical Writer Polycom, Inc. richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom 303-223-5111 ------ rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom 303-777-0436 ------