Re: Move from Ventura to FrameMaker wise?

["Yves Barbion" <yves -dot- barbion -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Well, I moved from Ventura 4.0 to FrameMaker 3.0 back in 1993, and I don't
regret it. ;-)

Indeed, I remember Ventura as one of those "love 'em or hate 'em"
applications. If everything went well, you could be VERY productive, but one
minor glitch in one of the linked files and you could spend days trying to
locate the cause of the problem. Yes, Ventura was a bit "buggy" back then,
but it did have the "bidirectional link" with text files. This meant that
you could write a marked-up WordPerfect file, import it into Ventura, edit
it in Ventura and the linked WordPerfect file would be saved as well. Worked
great for localization purposes: all our translators needed were the
WordPerfect files. Round-tripping "avant la lettre". A feature which
FrameMaker still does not have, unless you use XML files in structured
FrameMaker and an XML editor instead of WordPerfect. ;-)

Compelling reasons to move to FrameMaker? From the top of my head:

   - stability
   - single-sourcing, cross-media publishing (e.g. in combination with
   MIF2Go or WebWorks Publisher)
    - variables, cross-references
   - powerful table features (esp. with the TableCleaner plug-in)
   - book concept and related features
   - smooth "Save as PDF" with all the hyperlinks and bells and whistles
   included
   - conditional text


Best regards


--
Yves Barbion
Technical Writer
Adobe-Certified FrameMaker Instructor
____________________________________

U&I Learning nv (formerly ATeK nv)
Molenaarsstraat 111
B-9000 Gent
Belgium
Tel.: +32 9 265 74 72
Fax: +32 9 265 74 84
www.uni-learning.com
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