atw: Re: Arbortext Epic with Style compared with Structured FrameMaker
- From: Andrea Tappe <Andrea.Tappe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 28 Feb 2005 15:43:25 +1100
Hi Hedley,
I did an evaluation of Arbortext a couple of years back (mid-2003).
Migrating legacy unstructured FrameMaker - no experience importing Frame
files. Had a number of problems importing existing Word documents (funny
formatting, import going AWOL etc).
Installing and implementing chosen solution - only used a demo version,
which was easy enough to install. The marketing guff didn't make it clear to
me that you needed a separate Arbortext style sheet editor to make the whole
thing work properly, so had some happy moments trying to work out why my
documents were suddenly all in bright blue, bold 20pt Arial type, playing
hunt the page and so forth.
The editor on its own was expensive (for our budget) and with the style
sheet editor, the cost became quite prohibitive (I think it worked out to be
tens of thousands $Aus, but can't recall the exact figure). On top of that,
we would have required the services of an expert to configure it so it would
work - I couldn't make the style sheet behave itself even when a kindly help
desk person took pity on me and let me have a demo version of the style
sheet editor thingy.
Authoring environment/content/output - wish I had my report here for
guidance! I had a lot of problems with the different views, trying to work
out where I had to be to edit things, trying to see how my output would
look, trying to get things in a sensible order etc. With experience, I think
this would cease to be a problem, but initially I'd say that intensive
training would be required to get users up to speed.
To sum up, I found working with Arbortext pretty painful. Had it been cheap,
I'd have lived with the pain, but it was the most expensive XML editor that
I evaluated. Hopefully there have been a few improvements to the usability
since I saw it last!
HTH, Andrea
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