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Subject:Framemaker as authoring tool From:Ben Kovitz <apteryx -at- CHISP -dot- NET> Date:Thu, 28 Jan 1999 14:20:47 -0700
Tim Altom wrote, in a message about something complete different:
>And FrameMaker is a kicker of an authoring tool.
I've been meaning to ask some more-knowledgeable people about
this for a while. Adobe bills Framemaker as an authoring tool as
well as a page layout or typesetting program, and I've heard many
people say the same thing.
I have Framemaker and have done a bunch of things with it, but I
am not an expert in it. I haven't yet found the features of
Framemaker that make it seem like a great authoring tool.
Perhaps they are just not obvious--Framemaker's well-known "steep
learning curve". (A nonsensical metaphor, but let's ignore
that.)
Would anyone out there care to point out why Framemaker is so
good for authoring? (As opposed to page layout, etc.)
To the uninitiated, the following reasons make Framemaker seem
rather weak as an authoring tool. Maybe someone can point out
what's wrong with these or why they're irrelevant:
o There's no outline mode! How can you do serious authoring
without an outliner? This also makes navigation through the
document unnecessarily clumsy. (Word has a pretty decent
outliner. Recently someone came out with an outline plug-in
for Frame, called Enhance, but it's not available for Mac.)
o Bugs, bugs, bugs, and more bugs. Even the current version of
Frame, 5.5.6, is as chock full of bugs as Word. It amazes me
that people even like it for typesetting: italics jam into
adjacent roman type; the same footnote symbol can appear
twice on the same page; thousands more at this level of
carelessness.
o Clunky user interface. Zillions of bad decisions slow you
down. The thesaurus doesn't look up the word the cursor is
on, i.e. you have to type it in again; switching windows
requires going down two menu levels; parameters are scattered
throughout different menu items so they're hard to find;
keyboard shortcuts have several keystrokes and are confusing;
the facility for redefining the shortcuts is too buggy to use;
the Mac version doesn't even do drag-and-drop; re-applying a
paragraph format doesn't kill character formatting if the
first character has an override; you constantly have to redraw
the screen to clear glitches; hundreds more.
o You're always in page layout mode. That is, you're always
staring the page breaks, numbers, headers, footers, etc. in
the face, even when all you want to do is get some content
into the machine--i.e. even when you just want to think about
the authoring side.
o You can't say that one style is "based on" another, and thus
you can't easily redefine a single attribute across a related
set of styles. So, for example, if you want to experiment
with different looks, you can't redefine the default font of
one or two base styles and have the whole document fall into
place. You have to redefine the default font of each
paragraph one by one. (I have a trick for this, but even so
it's a nuisance.) In general, it seems that if you know
exactly what format you want, Frame will let you do it,
making it good for typesetting; but if you want to explore
and experiment, Frame is not going to help you, making it poor
for authoring or design.
I hear that a number of people use Nisus Writer for authoring and
then import into Frame to make the layout. I haven't tried this,
though.
Don't get me wrong: I hate Word as much as anyone. And I use
Frame because it gives more control over the output. But for
authoring, Frame seems like the weaker of the two. Unless
there's something important that I'm missing, which is why I'm
asking. In other words, I don't want to start a debate over which program
is best. Please, no one do that. I just want to know what motivates
people to say, "Frame is great for authoring!" What's it got that other
stuff hasn't got?
