Replacing Framemaker

[Steve Rickaby]

Rebecca

>Someone left on my desk (presumably to irritate the heck out me), an article from the January STC Magazine Intercom called "Old Software." They underlined a paragraph which says, "also absent from this discussion is Adobe Framemaker, which is starting to show its age and lack of recent development. Fans may want to consider using OpenOffice.org Writer."

Just an afterthought... Too often folks who criticize FrameMaker like this have no real, or deep, knowledge of the application or what it can do. The writer of that article should be made to justify their words.

I sometimes think I'd dearly like to see a head-to-head challenge between a competent FrameMaker user and a competent Word user (or 'FrameMaker 'alternative of your choice' user) to perform a series of standard operations we take for granted in FrameMaker. Such a test could involve creating a template with a dozen styles, expanding that into a book, top and tailing the book, indexing a few paragraphs, making all the table styles consistent, and so on... against the clock.

The results would be interesting, to say the least. And the demonstration of FrameMaker's ability to do ordinary things faster, and out-of-the-ordinary things *at all*, would maybe sell a load more site licenses to middle management.

By the way, someone on the 'FrameMaker for OS X' group might have messed with Writer, if you want to post there for real-world experiences.

-- 
Steve