Re: The Frame/Word Connection (WAS: Technical Manual Production)

[George Mena <George -dot- Mena -at- ESSTECH -dot- COM>]

That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that text and graphics in a
Frame document can't be copied and pasted into a Word 97 document and
vice versa, because they *can.*

Copying the text in Frame and (here's the tricky part) using the Paste
Special command in the Edit menu in Word 97 *does* let FrameMaker-based
text *and graphics* be successfully ported over to Word!  As the Paste
Special command in the Edit menu is also part of the Windows API (both
Frame and Word have the Paste Special command in their Edit menus, which
leads me to make such an assumption), this is most definitely a two-way
street.

My own firsthand experience on my current contract in having to swap
text and graphics between the two applications is what I'm basing my
statements on.  I do this now and I do it regularly.  Why would the
folks at Adobe write an export filter when they don't *have* to?

Would it be nice?  Sure.  They may even do it. :D  Right now, different
paste options exist for both text and graphics, so I don't think you
would want to go Select All / Copy / Paste Special and be done with it.

Right now, you have to make the following decisions:

Graphics:
*       metafile vs. enhanced metafile
*       float over text vs. not float over text

If you want your graphics anchored in Word and you also want to avoid
the infamous Red-X Menace, don't let the graphics float over the text.
Making this an *option* was one of the dumber things the morons in
Redmond did to screw up an otherwise perfectly good program like Word,
IMO.

Text:
*       formatted text (RTF)
*       unformatted text
*       embedded Word object (Frame only)
*       linked Word object (Frame only)

I use unformatted text because I can then use the existing style tags in
both Word and Frame to edit the text as necessary.  And here, using
embedded and linked Word objects are a waste of time in my book.  This
time, Adobe screwed up.  Easier to just dump the text in and throw a tag
on it.  Besides, the RTF option on both Word and Frame is
truck-flattened roadkill in my book because the RTF option doesn't work
anyway.  Unformatted text only, please. Keeping things simple seems to
be something that the product developers at both Adobe and Microsoft can
not master.

If any *developer* is willing to offer a responsible point of view, I'm
more than willing to hear it.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled Bugs Bunny and Tweety show. :D

George Mena

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Klopfenstein, Ed (AFS) [SMTP:edk -at- ACCU-FAB -dot- COM]
> Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 1998 5:47 PM
> To:   TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU
> Subject:      Re: Technical Manual Production
>
> Maria:
>
> The most common software we use includes Word 97, Freehand, RoboHelp,
> and
> Photoshop. We would prefer to move to FrameMaker because of its
> stability
> for long documents, however, our customers require soft copy in Word
> 97 and
> FrameMaker doesn't export to Word 97 (according to Adobe's web site).
> Once
> Adobe writes an export patch that works for Word 97, we'll definitely
> make
> the switch.
>
> I think I saw a survey once that more tech writers were moving to
> FrameMaker
> than any other program.
>
> Ed
>