FrameMaker Tips

Managing Format Overrides

When copying content from one manual into another manual, it’s easy to create a format override.

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Category: Using FrameMaker

Relevance: All Manuals

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Overrides can cause problems. Text with an override won’t be updated when the document is updated. For example, if a date tag in the footer of a document has an override, the date won’t be updated when Desktop processes the book. As a general rule, overrides are only acceptable when used to correct widowed or orphaned lines of text.

Format Overrides

FrameMaker treats changes in text, character, and table properties that differ from the tag definitions as overrides. In addition, if the current document does not have a definition of the format, such as when you copy and paste text from other documents, it is considered an override.

The following cases are considered overrides:

• When you apply formatting using the toolbar—such as applying bold, underline, or italics.
• When you edit the paragraph, character, or table format in the Designer and then apply the changes only to the selection, without updating the format definition. (Clicking the Apply button.)
• When you copy content from one document into another document and the pasted text uses a tag that exists in the new document, but the definitions don’t match, an override is created.
• When you copy content from one document into another document and the new document does not contain the tag used in the pasted content, the new tag will have an override and will not appear in the catalog.

Note: If properties of table cells are changed from Table > Format > Custom Ruling and Shading, then it is not flagged as a table format override.

A paragraph tag override is indicated by an asterisk (*) before the paragraph tag name in the lower left corner of the FM window.

There is no indicator for overriden character tags or table tags.

Search and remove format overrides

You can search and remove paragraph, character, and table format overrides in a book or document.

1. Select Edit > Find, and from the Find pop-up menu, select the format override type.

2. In the Change pop-up menu, select Remove Override.

3. Click Find, and then click Change for each instance of the format override.