3.3 How to use format override rules

We recommend that you use character tags in FrameMaker whenever you want to specify the appearance of characters. (See Section 7.1, "Use the paragraph and character catalogues".) However, some FrameMaker documents do contain characters that have no character tag, but do have formatting applied to them. You can use WebMaker to specify how such characters appear when converted to HTML.

To specify how WebMaker converts characters that use format overrides, you need to define a format override rule that maps the character style to the HTML highlight name.

WebMaker recognizes the ANGLE, FAMILY, VAR and WEIGHT parameters of FrameMaker characters. Format override rules may specify different combinations of these parameters to match characters with no tags but with formatting applied to them and map them to HTML highlights. You can map a character tag to None to give those characters no HTML highlight.

For example, you might create format override rules such as these:

• For characters whose angle is oblique, map them to the Italic HTML highlight.
• For characters whose angle is oblique and whose family is Courier, map them to the Variable HTML highlight.

Note that characters can match more than one format override rule. For example, consider characters whose angle is Oblique and family is Courier. Those characters match both the rules listed above.

In cases where characters match more than one format override rule, the most detailed rule takes precedence. In this example, the second rule is more detailed than the first rule because it specifies more aspects of the characters. Thus, the second rule is used for characters that match both rules.

You can create format override rules using WebMaker's graphical user interface or by writing WML rules directly (see Section 12.8.2, "Syntax of format override rules").