I would never profess to being anywhere near an expert in FrameMaker, but my limited experience under the tutelage of the (large multi-national) company expert was one of the most frustrating experiences of my working life. There appeared to be no shortcuts for anything. To go from one style to another within the document was a multi-step process that required mouse and keyboard actions. In MSword, I can change from one style to another as I type with simple shortcut keys.
The 30 p/day that I was doing in Word at the same time was actually 37 pages in less than 7 hours, written from scratch using multiple graphics, several different styles, cross references... and the info was extracted from four archive boxes of about 30 largish paper files.
And truly, for the FrameMaker job, it was the constant mouse grabbing, window hopping, pain in the Rs that took the time. Changing from text to bullet and back again was umpteen steps. And tables... don't talk to me about tables.
There's plenty I don't like about Word but, in my limited experience, there's a whole lot more I don't like about Structure FM. Even the conversion to web pages was more arduous than I'd experienced using off-the-shelf MSWord converters. It was probably something to do with my (and my mentor's) lack of knowledge, but a bad time was had by me despite meeting or exceeding their expectations.
I'm not sure where you're coming from the the getting bogged down in details like page breaks. What's that about, then? :) I find judicious use of keep-with-next styles overcomes most pagination issues -- if that's what you mean.
Cheers, Terry
I can't speak for FrameMaker but structured docs in general should mean faster output, not slower, because you are not bogged down in formatting details like page breaks and so on while you are writing. And in the SGML/XML editor I use, only one editing window is required. Also, pages-per-day figures are going to vary greatly with the experience of the operator. People with a lot of experience can often be remarkably productive with even the clunkiest software, while people with no experience usually aren't very productive with even the slickest software. -- Janice
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