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Subject:Re: Framemaker Weirdness From:Kent Newton <KentN -at- METRIX-INC -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 7 Feb 1996 10:43:00 PST
On Wednesday, February 07, 1996 9:40 AM, TECHWR-L wrote:
>Yikes! My Technical Writers and I have been following the Frame
Conquers
>the Universe threads with great interest. We are currently
investigating
>Electronic Publishing products, each of which has their own limitations
>for particular situations. I am a former user of earlier versions of
>Frame, and have only seen the flashy demo of version 5. Can anyone shed
>some light on the [below]? Is this behaviour common, or could it be
>something isolated to <anonymous>'s installation?
>I will take Word weirdness over FrameMaker weirdness any day.
>Disappearing
>graphics,
Yes, I've had graphics disappear. Usually when I imported by reference
instead of pasting the graphic into the Frame document. And no, the
graphic had not been moved or renamed. I think Frame just somehow lost
the link.
>an application that suddenly notifies you that it is out of
>memory is going to quite RIGHT NOW, anything you'd care to save?
Yes, this bugs me to no end. It happened all the time when I ran on
Windows 3.1 (486 machine with 16MB RAM). It hasn't happened once after I
switched to a Pentium with 16 MB RAM running Win 95. I couldn't
understand, and still can't, how a program could crash and still take the
time to save the document you are working on before it terminates.
Puzzles me to no end.
>text and graphics that overlap each other for no apparent reason,
Never happened to me.
>mysterious flickering characters, the constant need to refresh the
screen to see what is there
>clearly,
Yes, this happens to me occasionally. I think it has to do with the
video memory and graphic GDI use. It's not a real drawback, but it is
annoying and distracting.
>spell checking that highlights words that aren't visible on the
>currently displayed page...
Yes, but Word does the same thing.
>Need I go on? FrameMaker has some very useful features,
>but it has a lot of problems as well. I wish people would stop
>praising it to high heaven and instead tell its new owners at Adobe to
fix
>this damn thing before someone else comes along with a better DTP for
>long documents. Word has a lot of useful features that FrameMaker would
>do well to copy
I agree with all of this. There are some features in Word that I would
love to see in Frame, such as the ability to customize the toolbar and
menus, a macro language to automate processes, the ability to assign hot
keys to perform procedures or issue commands (Frame has so many
hard-coded, archaic hot key combinations that they devote 23 pages to
them in their Quick Reference Guide -- the largest section in the guide),
drag and drop editing, and...well you get the idea. Frame is powerful,
but it is not as user friendly as Word is. I think Frame could put in
more features to make it easier to use.
Kent Newton
Senior Technical Writer
Metrix, Inc.
kentn -at- metrix-inc -dot- com
