atw: Re: Who Uses What and Legacy Document Conversion (Word > Frame)

Hi Mick

If you're investigating a move away from the evil empire, you may want to 
consider all the alternatives:

Frame - Adobe still can't make up their mind whether they are going to continue 
to fully support Frame and therefore it suffers from it's own batch of 
nastiness (eg one level of undo). The biggest issue with using Frame though, is 
sharing content with Word users in the rest of the organisation. Conversion 
from Word is hard enough to make it a one way street. There is some support for 
XML but it is not native to the file format.

WebWorks - A lot of work to set up to run properly (if you're used to 
HDK/RoboHelp type tools you might get a bit of a shock as to just how much 
work) but does a decent job when you finally get there.

XML - Probably the best way to future-proof your documentation at the moment, 
but the learning curve is very, very, steep and shouldn't be entered into 
without a good reason to go down that path just yet. (That said, where I am 
now, we *are* going down that path because we have large areas of reuse, 
translation issues, etc, and therefore require a CMS - and XML is the best 
thing to feed a CMS). The same issues with sharing content with Word users 
comes up.

OpenOffice - Plays pretty well with Word docs (I've heard that only the most 
complicated sometimes need a bit of a fix up - personally I haven't needed to 
do any) and seems to be able to be flipped back and forward as needed. It has 
an XML-based file format so it is reasonably future-proofed. I haven't played 
with it that extensively but I was pleasantly surprised. Not sure what tools 
are out there to assist you to pump out different media formats though (HTML, 
online help, etc).

As for what's the "industry standard", if you go by "what is the most used" 
statistics you'll find that Word wins hands down. If your aim is to get away 
from Word I would use different arguments than statistics.

Hope that gives you food for thought.
-Melanie Kendell

----- Original Message -----
From: Mick Washbrooke <MickWashbrooke@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 10:00 am
Subject: atw: Who Uses What and Legacy Document Conversion (Word > Frame)

> We're considering moving from our currently inadequate Microsft Word
> environment to a FrameMaker/WebWorks Publisher combination for our doc
> development platform. To bolster our case for moving away from the 
> evilMicrosoft Word, our manager has asked us to come up with 
> statistics on which
> doc development platform (or combination of tools) is considered the
> "industry standard" in Australia. Does anyone know where I might 
> find such
> statistics?
> I've also been researching what kind of pre-processing I might 
> have to do on
> our legacy .rtf files to facilitate the conversion of these docs to
> FrameMaker; i.e., removing page and section breaks, embedded 
> graphics, etc.
> If anyone has any tips, they'd be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks
> -------------------------------------
> Mick Washbrooke
> CITECT
> Tel: 9496-7432
> mickwashbrooke@xxxxxxxxxx
> www.citect.com
> 
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