TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Re: Any Word on Word? From:Tim Altom <taltom -at- SIMPLYWRITTEN -dot- COM> Date:Sat, 17 Oct 1998 07:39:30 -0500
List regulars can probably guess my reaction to this: get out of both and
into FrameMaker. Read no farther if you don't want opinion with your coffee
this morning.
Both Word and PM are clumsy and inefficient tools for documentation this
large; it's FM's forte. FM is almost worthless for short docs, leaving those
to the Word/PM apps. PM is primarily a brochure tool.
To return to Al's point, however, I think it's foolish to let your
translation vendor or printer "pick" your tool. Phooey. Get a good vendor.
Ours can take anything we throw onto the table before them. That's why we
use them. We use FM because it saves us a typical 20% on project time...the
equivalent of getting a 20% increase in your budget. Interested? Sure, it
takes a while to learn and it's not ubiquitous, but those are specious
arguments for the true professional. Among engineers, for example, AutoCad
is the tool of choice for CAD, but hardly for parametric drawings. There
you'll find more powerful tools that take longer to learn, and which are
rarer, such as SolidWorks or ProEngineer.
Given a choice between PM and Word, I'd go with PM. At least it's true DTP,
wherein graphics, callouts, and headers/footers don't blow up, shift around,
or lose track of their own origins. Don't be fooled by Word's supposedly
universal applications, such as internal HTML. Most of Word's wonders don't
work properly. You're better off getting a solid tool like Frame or PM and
getting a filter for output. And find a translation company that doesn't
implicitly charge more for common tools.
Tim Altom
Adobe Certified Expert, Acrobat
Simply Written, Inc.
317.899.5882 http://www.simplywritten.com
Creators of the Clustar Method for task-based documentation
>My department is wondering whether to consider using Word 97 instead of
>PageMaker for our major documents. We're being encouraged to do so by our
>translation agencies, who claim we'd save on costs, but the people who
>broker our printing don't want us to, for reasons that they aren't too
>specific about. Our manuals are about 50-100 pages and up, with a
>substantial number of graphics.
>I'd be interested in hearing from anyone with experiences to
share--positive
>or negative.
>
>Thanks!
>-Al Brown
