Re: Ventura Redux

[Jonathan Lavigne <jpl -at- LYRA -dot- STANFORD -dot- EDU>]

Mike Christie <mikec -at- syntel -dot- com> writes:

>Does anyone out there have experience converting from Ventura to Frame? Does
>Frame Windows version provide a filter to import VP-Win files? How easy is
>the transition to Frame for a VP user? What other considerations should I
>be looking at.
Mike,

I got FrameMaker 4.0 for Windows a couple of months ago (for the academic
price, by the way, of $186 -- one of the advantages of toiling in the groves
of academe). I haven't yet used it extensively, but it does have a VP to FM
filter that seems to work fairly well. I ran one of my manuals through it and
got a FrameMaker document that picked up quite a bit of the original
formatting and in which all the VP tag names seemed to come across as
FrameMaker styles. I can't say that the formatting was right for each style,
but at least I could redifine things in FrameMaker if necessary. I do a fair
amount of elaborate stuff in my VP documents, so I didn't really expect
everything to work, but the result seemed to be serviceable.

One thing I really like about Ventura is that you can keep files in their
original format. That's fairly important, since I'm producing stuff that's
sometimes taken from documents other people work on. I guess I'm going to
lose that capability with FrameMaker. Also, I've found that I can usually
kludge Ventura to do just about anything I want to do. I wonder
if FrameMaker is quite as kludgeable. Of course maybe it will let me do what
I want without kludges.
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Jonathan Lavigne                                BL -dot- JPL -at- RLG -dot- STANFORD -dot- EDU
Research Libraries Group/Stanford University