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I've put together a comparison summary grid made up of comments I received
through this list related to personal experiences with Word, FrameMaker
and Quark. If you'd like a copy of the grid, please email me off-list and
I'll send you a copy in a Word doc.
Although the grid contains some contradictory opinions,
I find all the informatiom useful because it expresses multiple
perspectives of these
tools rather than one person's or company's viewpoint. Of course one
should demo tools for themselves and have clear ideas of what kinds of
docs they intend to create. These elements are a given. It is always
useful, however, to also consider other's tales from the trenches.
One point of clarification. At my company, we use Word during review
since we all have the program. This was a tradition before I got here,
but I've changed it a bit (although not completely because others may balk
at having to write out comments in longhand). I ask reviewers to use
Word's Comments feature (not Track Changes). I find people tend to write
more and focus more if they can comment through Word. And since I send
out copies of the document through email for their comments, along with
specific framing questions to focus the review, my source document isn't
touched by anyone but me.
Some mentioned that Adobe Acrobat allows reviewers to edit online. I'll
have to investigate that.
IPCC 01, the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference,
October 24-27, 2001 at historic La Fonda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
CALL FOR PAPERS OPEN UNTIL MARCH 15. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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