Just my two cents on this. There is no right answer. Depends where you want the control to be and maybe your philosophical approach - as in "no formatting in the EDD".
When I went structured, it was an opportunity to reduce paragraph format bloat. I analyzed what I needed, pared down the paragraph and character formats and tried to stay that way. I didn't want a different format for every possible different formatting issue that might come up. In part this means that if you are strict about things you don't let users deviate from the set of formats that are provided. But you can cover acceptable deviations by putting formatting in the EDD (if your philosophy permits this). As a practical matter, I have found that due to limitations in the EDD, there are times when putting formatting in the EDD works well and times when it just doesn't seem to work right. The conditions get too complicated and it isn't worth it. Of course, as a lone writer, I get to make all the decisions, but I try to act as if it were a bigger setup - no changes to para formats and no new on-the-fly formats allowed. With multiple books using the same EDD, they all have to comply or they get blasted every time I update the EDD, so there is a strong incentive to do things right. A previous respondent said: " The idea with structure is (as has already been said) to separate structure from display.?" I am not sure that I entirely agree with that. The idea of structure, particularly in FrameMaker, is that the computer enforces the formatting based on the element structure rather than writers needing to apply formatting via paragraph tags as they go along. If you are in a non-WYSIWYG environment, then you don't get the display. In FrameMaker you get the display too, but you don't have to be responsible for it, just for applying the correct element tags. Whether the computer enforces the formatting based entirely on what is in the EDD or on a mix of EDD coding and para formats is an implementation detail. Either way the application of formatting is done by the computer, not by the user. Fred -- Fred Wersan VT M?K, Principal Technical Writer 68 Moulton Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 T: +1.617.876.8085 x124 Email: fwersan at mak.com Get Realistic Background Traffic - up to 75% off! www.mak.com/YourPatternOfLife | Offer ends September 25, 2012
