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Being a Frame partisan, I always advocate moving documentation to FrameMaker
when feasible, and you certainly have more than enough reason to. Geoff
Hart's recommendations, involving doing the docs first in Word then moving
them to Frame, makes a lot of sense in your situation. Once you get the docs
into FrameMaker, then you'll eventually want to convert them back to Word
for SMEs to edit. This is what we do:
We work in the opposite direction because we have many documents already in
FrameMaker that need to be updated and annotated by SMEs. We use mif2go to
convert Frame docs to Word using a Word template with change tracking
already turned on. The latest versions of mif2go do a good job of preserving
the Frame fornatting, so it makes it easier for SMEs to relate what they see
in the Word doc to what they see in the printed manual. When the SMEs are
done making their edits, comments, etc., they give us the Word docs back.
Then it's simply a matter of copying and pasting their changes, nicely
tracked by Word, back into the Frame manual as appropriate and then editing
and doing our other tech writerly stuff to their contributions. (Pasting
from Word directly into Frame is possible by editing the maker.ini file
ClipboardFormatsPriorities to start with DOC, RTF, ...)
RoboHelp for FrameMaker is a NEW online publishing tool for FrameMaker that
lets you easily single-source content to online Help, intranet, and Web.
The interface is designed for FrameMaker users, so there is little or no
learning curve and no macro language required! Call 800-718-4407 for
competitive pricing or download a trial at: http://www.ehelp.com/techwr-l4
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