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On 10/6/05, Wilcox, Rose <rwilcox -at- ssqi -dot- com> wrote:
> My boss believes InDesign will answer our needs for database publishing
> and so wants to move our FrameMaker books into InDesign, reasoning since
> both programs are from Adobe, it should be an easy conversion.
Your boss's reasoning is exceptionally faulty, though it's
understandable how someone who doesn't know much about either desktop
publishing or the history of its development might jump to that
conclusion.
Adobe didn't write FrameMaker in-house; they bought it when it was
already a very mature, externally-developed product, and while they
have taken over development and added a few new features, I would
imagine that much/most of the original code and document structure
remains. (Excellent history here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framemaker)
InDesign *was* coded from the ground up at Adobe, but its target
market, as I understand it, was to compete with Quark XPress and
replace Adobe *PageMaker* (originally an Aldus product, then also
bought by Adobe), which is a very different kind of publishing model
from Frame's.
There *are* well-established conversion pathways from both PageMaker
and Quark XPress to InDesign, and tools as well.
To get from Frame to InDesign, you are likely going to have to export
your Frame documents as plain text, import them into InDesign, and
then laboriously reformat them. Even with the use of styles, it is
likely to be a long, slow, and painful process.
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