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RE: If Bill Gates is such a great philanthropist . . .
Subject:RE: If Bill Gates is such a great philanthropist . . . From:"Jonathan West" <jwest -at- mvps -dot- org> To:"'TECHWR-L'" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Fri, 27 Oct 2006 00:12:20 +0100
<< Let's assume that if you spend 4 hours setting up a document with Frame,
and 4 hours setting it up with Word, that you've covered the same ground by
the end of that time period. Say, a chapter files, a book file, TOC, Index,
headers, footers, paragraph tags, and character tags (or the Word
equivalents).
In Framemaker, by setting up those things, you're using the tool directly as
it's intended to be used. Someone coming along after you can pretty well
figure out what you've done -- let's assume that this "someone" is a tech
writer with, say 15 years' experience and extensive knowledge of the
workings of complex technical documents.
In Word . . . are you using it directly as intended, or do you have to
create workarounds or bring in outside utilities to achieve a good result?>>
I would say you are using it as intended. The problem in part is that as
Microsoft no longer publishes a reference manual for Word in the fashion of
the Framemaker reference, and as there are few books on Word that describe
how to use it professionally for substantial documents, the intended way
isn't actually properly documented anywhere any more. I've toyed with the
idea of writing a book on Word for professionals going step by step through
all the key elements of building large stable documents, but quite frankly
it would take a lot of time for not very much money.
<< I'm thinking of the autonumbering problem (and the attendant magically
appearing tabs and indents),>>
You need to define named ListTemplates and attach styles to them. Define
your own styles rather than reusing the built-in styles to avoid the "Jason
tabs" problem.
<< the broken Master Document feature (and the need to cobble together
Indexes and TOCs through other means)>>
You could build ToCs and indexes out of multiple files long before Master
Documents were ever invented, and the old method still works perfectly well.
Take a look here
<<, and undoubtedly other things as well. Can someone coming after you open
Word and, by following menu items and the online help, figure out what
you've done?>>
That depends on their level of skill. If they understand styles, fields and
ListTemplates, I see no reason why they wouldn't be able to pick it up more
or less straight away. I spend most of my time designing templates to be
used by people who can't be bothered to learn that stuff, so I provide a
highly customised UI and a good bit of underlying VBA as well in order to
make it easier for people to do things right than to do them wrong. If the
template including its UI is well designed, it requires only beginner skill
levels plus a small amount of training to create consistent stable long
documents.
<<If both Frame and Word can produce a basic document design in the same
amount of time, but if one is basically plain-vanilla use of the DTP
software and the other isn't, obviously there's still a difference of costs
and efficiency in the later life of the document, when other people have to
figure out how to maintain it.>>
Well, the thing about Word is that it is DTP software, but with added
ease-of-use features that make a lot of people not notice its underlying
power.
This whole Frame-is-better-than-Word-for-long-documents issue has been
around for a very long time. Take a look at a newsgroup discussion on this
very topic between myself and Sean Brierley - in 1998!
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