Re: Frame vs. Interleaf

[Robert Plamondon <robert -at- PLAMONDON -dot- COM>]

>4) Interleaf's founders come from a typesetting background, and this is
>reflected in the way that Interleaf handles documents. It's hard to explain,
>and I haven't used Interleaf in some years, but here goes: you'd have to
>apply styles to the text after it was composed, like newspapers are typeset.

This is not the case with Interleaf, and never has been (I used
version 1.0).  All text objects belong to one style or another; there
is no "style limbo." You can change a paragraph from one style to another
at any time.

>My concern with this ,when looking at publishing packages, is that I knew
>the engineers in my group would be using this package, too, and this
>approach would be alien to them. Frame has more of a word-processing
>approach to composing documents, and I think it was easier for them to pick
>it up.

With no training, engineers can fail at anything, just like everyone
else.  Of the 80 or so users of Word for Windows at WEITEK, not one
knows about styles.  About half of them have never noticed the plainly
visible button to center a paragraph, and do text centering by typing
spaces.  This is typical of Word users in general.

Such people require a couple of hours of training to be able to function
minimally in Interleaf.  In many companies, this is an insurmountable
barrier; employees are not trained.  Instead, new employees with the
requisite skills are hired to senior positions, leaving the current
employees to rot.  But I digress.

        -- Robert