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Here's the summary I promised concerning the second part of my question on
this subject. I would like to thank everyone for their input and opinions.
1. Is Framemaker expensive?
The majority of responses agreed that it sells for around $800 American and
$1000 Canadian.
2. Is Framemaker difficult to learn?
There were differing opinions concerning this question but the majority of
people believe that is isn't too difficult. The following are excepts from
some of the people who replied to this question.
Rebecca Merck wrote:
Although it's not like word, [Framemaker's] interface is VERY
straight forward, and I've been able to convert my first book in less than
24 hours (it's 450+ pages) with only the documentation that came in
the box.
Scott McClare wrote:
I taught myself Frame 4 in two ways: 1) I spent half a day going through
the tutorial that was supplied; 2) my first assignment involving Frame was
converting an OEM's documentation set over to the template and style of my
then employer. These two things were sufficient to give me a decent
working knowledge of Frame, enough to create documents from scratch and
edit
existing ones.
There's a fairly steep learning curve. It's not Word. But it's not
hopelessly complicated either, and once you get proficient with Frame
you'll begin to miss certain features when you fire up your word processor.
Art Campbell wrote:
*Brian Doonan* -> I heard that it was difficult to learn. Would I have to
take a course on Framemaker before I can realistically use it?
*Art Campbell* -> No, assuming you know something about layout and are
better-than average in Word. It's helpful if you're familiar with concepts
such as text tags, variables and so
on, but you should be able to be immediately productive using the
existing templates (a number that are not delivered on CD are available on
the WWW site.)
Theresa Wolfe wrote:
Yes it is difficult to learn. I installed the program two days ago and I
am still trying to figure out how to create a proper template! *(Note That
Theresa seems to support FM in spite of this).*
Jan Broomslitter wrote:
I recommend taking an advanced course after you really know what you want
to know [about FM].
Rikki Nyman wrote:
I heard that it was difficult to learn. Would I have to take a course on
Framemaker before I can realistically use it?
I got the luxury of one week of Frame training from Adobe, compliments of
my employer. It was worth every cent. If you can arrange training, will
get you up to speed faster. I could have learned it from the book (Adobe
classroom series) but it helps to have someone explain why something is not
working when you think it should.
Katav wrote:
No, READ THE MANUAL, JOIN THE FRAMEUSERS LIST.
3. The majority of people believed that Abode tech support was either
sufficient or good.
