Re: Revisiting Frame vs. Word in light of new capabilities]

[David Neeley <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Let me recap the problem to be sure my comments are based upon an
accurate description:

1. You have a number of modest-length manuals that must be frequently updated.
2. You must have all updates translated into Japanese.
3. You are worried about tool choice in your authoring tools.

Were I you, I would be doing a considerable rethinking of your
workflow. For one thing, I would assess the market for open-source
content management systems to see if one could be employed for the
storage and assembly of your documents. (Unless I miss my guess from
the formulation of the problem, the "powers that be" would probably
not consider a proprietary system such as Documentum).

Once in such a content system, the translation turnaround and cost
would be greatly reduced--you would submit only those items that have
changed from prior versions. In too many cases today, people are
paying a considerable portion of the cost of having an entire manual
done each time simply to be sure that updates are done.

When HP went to Documentum a few years ago, I understand they saved
about six million dollars the first year in translation costs alone.
Obviously, your situation is not as large or complex as HPs...but
still the principle is the same.

Next, comparison of authoring tools is often something of a religious
war. On the one hand there is Frame, which was designed from the
ground up for doing long and complex documents. Thus, it has a much
more sensible features list involving features that actually work,
such as Frame's Book feature compared to Word's Master Document--not
to mention the infamous auto-numbering problems still in Word.

Frame's downsides as I view them presently are somewhat different than
yours. Primary among them is the incredibly cloudy future it presents,
with Adobe's history of rather indifferent support. This alone
militates for the solution I will get to in a moment.

Word offers widespread use and some familiarity--but relatively seldom
is a given user an expert. It is, in fact, entirely too easy for Word
to totally screw up a document because of a failure to understand the
proper use of styles, to name just one. Thus, I view the widespread
*lack* of understanding regarding how to employ Word reliably to be a
major drawback. It is simply too easy to have the original files
totally messed up, while offering the illusion to management that
there are some sort of savings to be derived from Word simply because
"everyone knows it."

Personally, I believe that your existing document base in Frame argues
for it to continue in Frame--at least until you can begin to
transition the originals to a fully structured basis. Once you are in
some sort of standardized XML, your options expand greatly. Then,
whether you stay in Frame, use Word, or any of the burgeoning numbers
of XML editors makes little difference. In addition, at that point you
will be much more able to begin to employ a content management system
as I first suggested.

At the moment, I would seriously suggest using a subset of Simplified
DocBook so you need not become embroiled with the intricacies of EDD
creation and will also be able to use Word more readily--at least in
its latest incarnation.

Of course, I would also seriously begin to explore using
OpenOffice.org at some point. I believe it is in some ways already a
superior choice to Word and only continues to get better.

By the way, the comment about "downloading a tool from Microsoft to
remove round-trip formatting from Word 2000 HTML"...there is already
quite a good tool from the W3C in HTML Tidy, and the ability of
Dreamweaver to "de-Microsoft" HTML code is also excellent.

David

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