RE: Re[2]: FW: What tools to use: Single Sourcing: Robohelp vs.

["Brierley, Sean" <Sean -at- Quodata -dot- Com>]

I have authored 600-88-page Word and FrameMaker books, both.

	-----Original Message-----
	From:	CHRISTINE ANAMEIER [SMTP:CANAMEIE -at- email -dot- usps -dot- gov]

	 ran into serious trouble was when I tried to incorporate a
	     section with different margins. (I never did get that working
right.)
	     I did run into the numbered list bug a couple of times early
on, but
     for some reason it settled down eventually.


I ran into the same kinds of instabilities in Word that Christine was happy
working with. I found workarounds, and spent a lot of time wrenching on Word
to make it jump through the hoops others have referred to. Yes, Word will do
these things. However, FrameMaker is designed for these things, is more
stable when it comes to long tech docs, and FrameMaker does not have to be
pushed and pulled through hoops to get the job done.

Honestly, I could also author long documents in Notepad.exe, manually
scripting tags for whichever destination app or HTML, for example, but I
prefer not to.

Anyway, if you have a tool and workflow that gets the job done to your
satisfaction, I recommend you stick with it. Otherwise, do yourself a favor
and use something else. When it comes to the topic of this thread,
single-sourcing, the low-end tools seem to be FrameMaker with Mif2Go,
WebWorks Publisher, and ForeHelp. I'm not sure RoboHelp can pull it off and
I'm pretty certain Word cannot.

Cheers,

Sean
sean -at- quodata -dot- com

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