Framemaker as authoring tool (postscript)

[Ben Kovitz <apteryx -at- CHISP -dot- NET>]

By the way, I forgot to mention that Frame's lack of outlining capability
is so frustrating that I'm now actually using the word processor in
Clarisworks just for its outliner and managing that in parallel with the
Frame document!  (I don't have Word on my Mac.  Didn't want to contribute
to Billyboy's bid for world domination unless I absolutely had to.  And if
I don't find some decent outliner soon, I may have to.)

I wonder, by the way, how many people distinguish between authoring and
other parts of the job, like formatting or document management.  The
book-publishing industry does, since different people do different jobs:
normally the author writes in Word and the typesetter imports it into
Frame.  But it seems that among tech writers, this distinction is not often
made as clearly.  The authoring part usually gets short shrift (except on
this list, of course).

I think of authoring as the part where you create or discover the content
and try out different ways to express it.  In other words, cranking out
text, shuffling it around and tweaking it, fiddling with the organization,
and, to a lesser extent, experimenting with different formats.  That's very
different than stuff like printing crop marks, very fine control of
placement via measurements you can enter in master pages, etc.  Clearly no
other tool is in Frame's league there, but that's got only a little to do
with the authoring side of the job.

--
Ben Kovitz <apteryx -at- chisp -dot- net>
Author,  _Practical Software Requirements: A Manual of Content & Style_
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1884777597
http://www.manning.com/Kovitz


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