Re: The Tools Tech Writers Use

[Damien Braniff <Damien_Braniff -at- PAC -dot- CO -dot- UK>]

I've been following this thread with some interest and would agree with the
general opinion that it's horses for courses- use what's right for the job.
Having said that I have a question re FM vs Word.  I've never used Frame -
mostly Word due to the way the docs are structured (none more than 100
pages) and the fact that we need Word for the HAT we use.

The docs we produce are, as I said, relatively short but 20+ are lumped
together to provide the lit for a single product (each individual module is
treated as stand alone). and it works OKish.  However it makes it a real
pain to index etc and now to my question.  We are currently developing the
next generation and of our main products and so there will be a whole NEW
set of literature.  At this point I'm taking the opportunity to look at
format, readability (including customer survey) etc to, hopefully!!,
improve the documentation.  I feel that it would be beneficial to treat the
product lit as ONE doc (with proper index etc) and will be looking at FM.
However, we also produce a lot of small docs - 3/4 page datasheets etc -
and wonder how well FM, promoted for long docs,  handles small ones.  Just
as well or would it be bettter to keep using Word for these?

Damien Braniff
Technical Author
PAC International

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