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InDesign CS3 is as good a choice for book length documents as anything
else on the market, and I can say that with some authority as I've
worked with almost every tool on the market. CS2 however has some
serious weaknesses.
We use CS3 for all of our docs. CS3 can easily handle documents that
are hundreds of pages long, and can generate tables of contents (or
figures, tables, etc.) with ease. It also has excellent indexing and
hyperlinking capabilities. Out of the box, it lacks a good
cross-referencing tool; however, there is a freely available script that
you simply plug in for page cross-references.
InDesign also has extremely powerful stylesheet capabilities which, when
combined with master pages, makes it very easy to repurpose content into
another page layout.
If you consider that the CS3 suite also come with the Version Cue
content management and workflow system, it's actually a better deal than
Framemaker. However, its current major limitation is that it doesn't
integrate with something like Robohelp or Flare. If you must also
produce help files from your source, you can either use your PDF output
and provide context sensitive links to PDF destinations or you must
"roll your own" solution to help files with custom scripting.
Another real barrier for InDesign in the long document world is that
almost all of the books, classes, etc. are built to teach how to build
"one-off" short documents. Building long documents that must be easily
maintainable is rarely discussed.
I've spent a lot of time working in the XML publishing side of things,
and I find InDesign's styles to be the functional equivalent of such XML
schemas as Docbook. With a little effort, you can actually import and
export valid XML. As such, I find it to be nearly an ideal text
authoring environment as well as a powerful layout tool.
Contact me off-list and I'll help you work through your problems...
Bill
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