atw: Re: Who Uses What and Legacy Document Conversion (Word > Frame)
- From: "Warren Lewington" <wjlewington@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2003 21:44:16 +1100
Melanie, the official word from Adobe is that FrameMaker will have to
continue, though the more flamboyant and glossy print/magazine style
formatting with graphical edges will be taken up by InDesign...
Great news.
Warren.
-----Original Message-----
From: austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:austechwriter-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of melanie.kendell
Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 10:46 AM
To: austechwriter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: 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
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
> -------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> **************************************************
> 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
**************************************************
**************************************************
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
**************************************************
Other related posts:
