Indexing recommendations

[Frank Stearns]

On Wed, 4 Oct 2006, Rick Quatro wrote:

> IXgen used to be the gold standard for manipulating FrameMaker markers, and 
> one that I used to heartily recommend. There are two things that soured me on 
> IXgen:
>
> 1) Upgrade prices are quite high, especially if you only use it occasionally.

Rick, you're not doing the full calculation. IXgen carries a **five year** 
performance warranty (mostly unheard of in the software industry). Said 
another way, there is no "annual maintenance fee" or leaving the users 
high and dry. You pay more, but you also get much, much more.


> 2) IXgen may alter your marker contents, for example, by adding a ] to 
> balance an opening [. This may be fine for Index markers, but may be

And index marker processing IS the primary focus of IXgen -- not 
specialized syntax for some other third-party product.


> inappropriate for other marker types. For example, if you use IXgen with 
> TimeSavers, you will not want anything added to your Hypertext markers. Many 
> TimeSavers Hypertext markers have a [ in them that should not be balanced. 
> IXgen should have a setting to prevent modification of your marker content, 
> but it doesn't.

The answer here is simple -- if you're one of the very small number of 
IXgen users who work with the TimeSavers product, *don't* use IXgen to 
process hypertext markers!! (Of course you can still use IXgen for index 
and other marker types that contribute to the index.)

We are looking at ways to accommodate TimeSavers, but we are unwilling to 
risk breaking indexing features that are very helpful to 99.999% of our 
users.


> For these reasons, I hesitate to recommend IXgen to my clients.

Admitting our bias, we do recommend IXgen for these reasons:

(a) feature set

(b) warranty

(c) long-term performance & history of our company and the product.

For a fully-functional demo, please visit the IXgen Central portion of 
www.fsatools.com

Frank Stearns Associates | makers of IXgen(tm) for FrameMaker(r)
franks at fsatools.com <mailto:franks at fsatools.com>
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