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Wow! I'm always amazed when I read these postings reagrding how many pages Word,
PageMaker, and Frame can comfortably handle. Fifty? Seventy? What sort of
machine are these folks using that 50-70 pages are all their software can
handle? We are running Word files of 360+ pages--full of graphics--and are
having no problems at all. Likewise, we have some large 50-100 page PageMaker
files that behave nicely.
We just got brand-new P6 200s a couple of months ago, but we were running these
big files on our old 486s without too much trouble (just a bit slow). We did
find that AmiPro files became unstable at large sizes and were vastly relieved
when our office switched to Word. For all the Word trashing that goes on,
believe me there are worse things out there.
Dianne Walsh
Documentation Manager
MEDecision Inc.
For those who asked--
Lori DeFurio, Adobe rep, did a nice job for our chapter last
Wednesday. However, her presentation focused largely on FrameMaker's
features, and less on a comparison. (This was fine in our area, where
FrameMaker is in use in few companies.)
She said that, once you get much over 50 pages, PageMaker gets
clunky to work with ("performance suffers");
also that Word isn't reliable over 50-70 page range, altho she was
professional enough not to trash Word.
Also, FrameMaker supports full range of colors; you can present
info in portrait or landscape view relatively easily in same doc. Another
impressive
feature was the conditional text, in which the same doc contains text
which can be suppressed depending on who the doc's going to. This might be
useful for people producing docs w/ multiple audiences (say, Operator and
Engineer).
In response to question about learning curve w/ FM, she said the
key was to understand the template feature thoroughly.
Hope that helps,
Mary
Mary Durlak Erie Documentation Inc.
East Aurora, New York (near Buffalo)
durl -at- buffnet -dot- net
