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Subject:Re: what should I say? From:Steven Brown <stevenabrown -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 5 Sep 2002 11:38:48 -0700 (PDT)
Yuck!
I found myself in the same position at my last
employer. As the company's first technical writer, no
one had any real expectations about my
"deliverables"...until I published a draft of my first
document. The content was good they said, but auddenly
everyone wanted it "pretty," which basically meant
turning over the content to Marketing to reformat my
document in Quark. And as we know, he who controls the
tool ultimately controls the content.
That opened up a whole mess of issues that are
probably on your mind, too. For example, if the
objective of a "pretty" document is increased
readability, well, that's a noble goal. Maybe a
well-structured Frame document IS less attractive than
a Quark document. But at what cost? Similarly,
single-sourcing is a good idea, but are you really
publishing to PDF and HTML?
My research at the time confirmed what we all know,
that Frame is better suited for (and designed
specifically for) large, highly-structured documents.
Quark is better suited to relatively short documents
with lots of images, lines, and such.
The best solution from their point of view would've
been for me to author in Quark. I probably would've
done so, even with a steep learning curve. (It doesn't
hurt to learn a new tool.) Quark supposedly offers the
ability to generate TOCs, indexes, and such, but I
would've been an unhappy camper.
We eventually found a solution: I would continue to
author documentation in Frame and Marketing would use
a Quark filter to convert Frame to Quark. Ironically,
we never got to put the tool through its paces because
the entire Marketing staff was laid off! (Obviously no
one in senior management thought about the impact to
all of the collateral they were responsible for.)
Ultimately, I used Frame to publish a single document.
Then my number came up and was laid off.
In the end, I think you have to decide just how much
pride of ownership you want/need in the documents you
author. If you really need it, assemble a strong
business case for using Frame, maybe by determining
the cost of reformating long docs. If your sense of
ownership is low, use Notepad and hand off a bunch of
simple ASCII files! I suspect any publishing solution
will work given enough time and tweaking!
Steven Brown
Senior Technical Writer
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