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I also use InDesign as my sole tech writing application. I do all my work on
a Mac, so that excludes the vast majority of technical writing applications
right there. That being said, I don't miss FrameMaker one bit. Either I've
learned to live with any shortcomings the product has when it comes to
creating long documents, or I don't notice them.
And Bill is right about the tight integration with other Adobe products. The
ability to jump from InDesign to Photoshop to Illustrator to Dreamweaver and
back is priceless. I'm not sure if FrameMaker is capable of the same on a
Windows box, but the tight integration Creative Suite 3 provides is
invaluable.
--
Seb http://www.techwritersblock.com
On 10/17/07, WilliamFLawrence -at- eaton -dot- com <WilliamFLawrence -at- eaton -dot- com> wrote:
>
> InDesign is my day-to-day technical writing tool. CS3 can do almost
> everything that Frame can do out of the box, and with some of the
> available plug-ins it's just as competent a tool for most tasks.
> Actually, it's a much better page layout tool. On the downside,
> InDesign's XML capabilities were targeted at a different market so,
> while it has quite powerful XML features, it's not a Docbook or DITA
> editing/publishing solution. Yet.
>
> By the way, CS3 also comes with a really nice content management system
> that tightly couples with the CS3 tools.
>
> Bill Lawrence
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: techwr-l-bounces+williamflawrence=eaton -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
> [mailto:techwr-l-bounces+williamflawrence=eaton -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com]
> On Behalf Of John Cook
> Sent: Wednesday, October 17, 2007 3:19 PM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: Re: Is FrameMaker dead?
>
> I use InDesign to develop my biweekly sci-fi
> magazine<http://raygunrevival.com/index.html>,
> and was missing some of the Frame-like text handling abilities in CS2
> that
> were added to CS3. ID gets closer with each new version to being a tool
> I'd
> consider using for day-to-day technical writing in addition to the more
> blatant desktop publishing applications.
> --
> John Cook
> Technical Writer / Help Author
> john dot cook at gmail dot com
>
> On 10/17/07, Seb <techwritersblock -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> > It will be interesting to see where FrameMaker and InDesign will be
> heading
> > in the near future. With every release, InDesign takes on more and
> more
> > features for long document support. Even as it is right now, there's
> some
> > significant product overlap.
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