Why Frame not Word?

[Joanna Sheldon <cjs10 -at- CORNELL -dot- EDU>]

ML>Upper management in my company is exerting pressure for
  >the documentation people to jump on the Word bandwagon
  >and abandon our dearly beloved FrameMaker.

KS>Hmmm, you'd think they'd be going in the other direction!

Don't let them do it to you!  I've been working with Word 6 for as long as
it's been out, and it's not adequate for documents over about 80 pages!  It
crashes, it hiccups, the master documents are capable of switching paths on
you and grabbing files from other subdirectories... I can give you details
if you want them.  Believe me, if you're working with anything but miniscule
documents, switching to Word will cost your company a lot of money in time
spent arguing with the program.

Frame is solid.  It may not play as nicely in the sandbox with other
programs as Word does, but that's a small price to pay.

KS>The recently released Word to Frame import filter for Word 6 does a
 >decent job of importing Word docs into Frame. Perhaps, you could
 >continue to use Frame for document assembly and final production,
 >importing Word files as necessary.

The Word to Frame import filter works if you aren't importing a lot of
tables.  Luckily, as I discovered yesterday, there is a solution to this,
even a reasonably elegant solution -- but it does not make use of the
W-2-F filter.

--Joanna



But if you are now working with large documents in Frame, I would fight
very, very hard against a complete switch to Word.

Regards,

                              Keith

 * 1st 2.00b #3667 * Why is abbreviation such a long word.
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C. Joanna Sheldon                                    cjs10 -at- cornell -dot- edu
GRAPHTECH CONSULTING                                 PO Box 288
Technical Writing, Editing, Graphics                 Lansing NY 14882
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