FrameMaker Single Master Template Procedure

If you use FrameMaker, you are probably aware of how much trouble you can get into when you have a set of separate templates for a book. But most people struggle with it anyway, not knowing how to get around it. I hope you will enjoy learning about a procedure I came up with many years ago for creating a single master template for all your different templates for a given project; say, the title page, table of contents, chapters, appendices, and index templates for a book. Using this procedure, you will take a set of separate template files for a book and create a single master template out of them. I am providing the instructions as a high-level list of steps; I assume you know FrameMaker well enough to know how to access the various commands.

The benefit of this procedure is that when you are done, you will have a single master template for your book. When you make a change to this master template, you can freely import that master template into all files in your entire book, so that each file in your book will be up-to-date with the latest version of your template, without worrying about messing up anything.
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