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 > > ------------------------------------------------------------------- > --------- > ------------------------------------------------------- > > > ************************************************** > To post a message to austechwriter, send the message to > austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx > To subscribe to austechwriter, send a message to austechwriter- > request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject field. > > To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter- > request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject field. > > To search the austechwriter archives, go to > www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter > To contact the list administrator, send a message to austechwriter- > admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx************************************************** > ************************************************** To post a message to austechwriter, send the message to austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx To subscribe to austechwriter, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "subscribe" in the Subject field. To unsubscribe, send a message to austechwriter-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe" in the Subject field. To search the austechwriter archives, go to www.freelists.org/archives/austechwriter To contact the list administrator, send a message to austechwriter-admins@xxxxxxxxxxxxx **************************************************