Re: InDesign woes

["Collin Turner" <straylightsghost -at- gmail -dot- com>]

I'm the Lone Tech Writer here, but I get a lot of documentation (in
Word) from other engineers, developers, etc. Believe me...it doesn't
always play nice. Flare has a much cleaner Style mapper than ID. It's
not bad, but I'd much rather just chop it into Text and import it
clean. Frame is better suited to that.

Bulleted lists...wow. Hmm. Example. Numbered lists, toss in a few
bullets and try to continue the numbering where you left off (in CS2).
Near impossible without feats of strength.

When it comes down to it, ID is still a Design Tool. A good one!
FrameMaker is a Doc tool. Neither is perfect. I just wanted to see if
anyone had any advice. I'm glad people do, but the majority confirmed
my suspicions.

Frame is still the tool to use in an Adobe house.

On Tue, May 13, 2008 at 8:11 AM,  <WilliamFLawrence -at- eaton -dot- com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> I'm a little confused about the problems you're having.  I write literally
> hundreds of pages in InDesign and don't mind it, and I'm fairly picky J
> Perhaps it's the way your pages are set up that's the sticking point?  Also,
> it imports Word surprisingly well if you take the time to reconcile the Word
> styles to InDesign styles.  If the Word documents didn't have styles
> rigorously applied to begin with, then as you say nothing works well.
>
>
>
> What made all of the difference with InDesign was building a set of
> paragraph styles, character styles, and page masters, which in turn I saved
> as a template.  I use only the styles for formatting, which allows me to
> switch style definitions and automatically reformat a document. My page
> masters have a single text frame that fills each page, and text flows
> automatically from page to page.  Almost all figures are anchored to their
> respective text so that they follow along in the layout as I add or subtract
> content.  No figures are embedded, and all are referenced from Version Cue
> (which provides version control). Set up that way, using InDesign isn't
> significantly different from Frame except that I have the added capabilities
> from Version Cue thrown in.
>
>
>
> Numbered lists are trivial to set up and are extremely flexible.  Any
> paragraph style can be set to be a numbered list.  I have styles for steps
> and sub-steps, figure numbers, table numbers, etc.  Actually, the InDesign
> approach to numbering has a lot more power than most systems as each list
> counter has a name, which can be referenced by text variables or other
> lists.
>
>
>
> Bill
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