Re: Why Frame not Word?

["Susan W. Gallagher" <sgallagher -at- STARBASECORP -dot- COM>]

OK, OK, Ok... Time for my $.02! Personally, I despise Frame...
I inherited it in my current company, and I use it, but I
hate it. My primary complaints are that it's keystroke
intensive, it handles imported graphics poorly, and it's
missing some alignment options that I view as critical. Allow
me to elaborate...

My favorite layout is mirror margins with sidetags on the
outside of the page. Although Frame will let me do this with
straight text and knows enough to flip the sidetag to the
outside when text flows to the next page, it is absolutely
brain-dead when you ask it to do this with tables or
graphics.

You ask this program to do a three column table with bitmaps
of toolbar buttons in the left-most column in the layout I
use and you can spend 1/2 hour rearranging things when the
table flips pages.

If you paste graphics in, or (heaven forbid) paste them into
a Word doc and import it, forget it. The graphics are there
until deadline day, then they disappear from the face of the
earth and you have to import them by reference (which is at
least a 5 or 6 keystroke process.

When placing toolbar graphics in text, I use a character position
with a -3pt baseline offset. So, next time I figure I'm OK because
the -3pt still shows in the dialog, but when I click OK it's gone
unless I take the time to type it in again. You put 10 or 12
graphics on an intro page and you're talking serious time here!

And, for cryin' out loud, don't forget to *specify* fixed
leading for all your paragraphs or every single page will have
different interline spacing! (Why this isn't the default is
beyond me!!!)

If I could print crop marks from Word, I'd throw Frame out the
window in a minute!!! (But, then, I've been using Word since
release 3.0...)

Sue Gallagher
StarBase Corp, Irvine CA
sgallagher -at- starbasecorp -dot- com