Indexing recommendations

[Rick Quatro]

Hi Frank,

First of all, let me say publicly that I have a great deal of respect for 
you, both professionally and personally. I admit that my comment about price 
is subjective and was based on competitors' prices. I concede that value is 
not always measured on initial cost alone.

As far as marker content modification, however, my criticism stands. 
TimeSavers is a mature, well-known product in the FrameMaker market. Because 
of TimeSavers' extensive use of markers, IXgen was a great product to use in 
conjunction with it. Earlier versions of IXgen did not alter marker content, 
making it entirely suitable for any kind of marker processing. If index 
marker processing is the primary focus of IXgen, then why allow it to 
process Hypertext markers at all?

It would be simple for IXgen to accommodate TimeSavers users: simply have an 
optional setting to prevent IXgen from altering the contents of markers. 
Making this optional would not break any indexing features, but would 
restore its usefulness for non-index use. Instead of looking at this as an 
accommodation for .001% of your users, look at it as way of increasing 
market share. Perhaps more important, it would prevent the alienation of 
existing IXgen users that happen to be processing non-index markers and 
don't want their marker content altered.

Respectfully,
Rick Quatro

>> 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.