Create & Apply Formats badness

[Ezra Steinberg <Ezra.Steinberg@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

FEATURE : File -> Utilities -> Create and Apply Formats
PLATFORM: FrameMaker 5.5.3 on Solaris 2.5.1
PROBLEM : Character formats added when not desired

DISCUSSION:
In an attempt to clean up an old book, I followed a suggestion I read
somewhere to delete all the tags in the paragraph and character catalogs,
then use Create & Apply Formats on all the chapters of the book to create
a "clean" set of tags (including new tags for the old ones that had
overrides).

What I discovered is that this feature also creates and applies character
tags as well as paragraph tags. I'm not sure what algorithm is used,
but the result is that a heading that is bold (for example) is assigned
a paragraph tag with all the appropriate attributes except for character
attributes (such as "bold") and then is assigned a character tag with
the "bold" attribute.

The alternative would have been for FrameMaker to set the Weight attribute
for the paragraph tag to Bold.

The negative side effect is that, when I generated my Table of Contents,
I found that the TOC entries for these headers were coming out bold,
even though the TOC-suffix paragraph tags for these headers did not have
the Weight attribute set to bold. What happened was that the Bold character
format was being applied to the ...TOC tag. (I didn't know FM had a rule
that if a para tag also has a character tag applied to it, that same character
tag is applied to the corresponding ...TOC tag in the TOC. Why??? TOC entries
don't have to share the same attributes as the corresponding entries in
the body of the book. In fact, they often don't.)

The only solution I found was to remove the character tag from the 
paragraph and set the para Weight to bold. (I also discovered that simply
placing the insertion point in the header paragraph and invoking
Format->Character-> Default Para Font was not enough to make the character tag
disappear from that header permanently. It would disappear from the
para/character status line at the bottom, but when I moved the insertion point
to another paragraph and then back to the header, I saw that the character
format had "returned". What I had to do was select the entire paragraph first,
the apply the default paragraph format. Has it always been thus in FM?)

Is this experience consistent with what others on this list have discovered?
Any lessons learned or caveats when using Create & Apply Formats?

Ezra

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ezra Steinberg				Resonate, Inc.
Human Factors Engineer			385 Moffett Park Drive, Suite 205
Senior Technical Writer			Sunnyvale, CA 94089
http://www.resonate.com			USA
Voice: 408.548.5529			FAX: 408.548.5679

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