Re: Subject: Re: New doc group: FrameMaker or Flare?

[Bill Swallow <techcommdood -at- gmail -dot- com>]

You're always going to find someone using a hammer as a crowbar, a
screwdriver as a chisel, and a wrench as a hammer. FrameMaker isn't
conducive to idiocy. Whatever tool you implement, train your team
well, have solid templates with limited styles in place, a solid style
guide, and a solid set of rules on formatting. If someone goes
override crazy, ding them on it. If they do it again, ding them hard
and have it appear on their review as a needed improvement. Why?
They're causing needless rework; that is, they're not a productive
member of the team until they clean up their act.

What damage they could inflict in FrameMaker is no different from what
they could do in Word, Flare, or any other (unstructured) tool. And if
the overrides they employ cause workflow/time/effort issues, that's a
performance issue, not a tools issue, to correct.

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 5:25 AM, David Neeley <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:
> If either printed or .pdf, whether to use Frame would seem to me to
> depend upon their willingness to engage a documentation professional
> on contract each time they need to produce a deliverable. In my
> experience, the incredible mess that is made by inexperienced people
> doing successive generations of edits and updates on Frame docs must
> truly be seen to be believed. To this day, I shudder when I think of
> some of the docs I inherited like this on a contract with Nortel over
> a decade ago. Format overrides alone were a nightmare when attempting
> to get a clean result in an upgrade on one of these things.

-- 
Bill Swallow

Twitter: @techcommdood
Blog: http://techcommdood.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/techcommdood
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