How long to learn framescript?

[Kevin Hunter]

At 11:45 -0800 22/1/07, Diane Gaskill wrote:

>I'm considering asking my manager to buy FrameScript for me and I have 
>to justify it of course.  Does anyone have any data on how long it 
>takes to become reasonably proficient using it. I have 4 years of sw 
>dev experience and 15 years of FM experience.


Hi Diane,

I get the digest version of the mailing list and have been away so didn't get a chance to read this earlier.

I just wanted to respond to your query from a different point of view: We had a series of user guides (totaling some 4000 pages) to which I wanted to apply some across-the-board formatting changes, resulting from inadequate document design and just a general need to update the look of our guides. Because of those same initial document design problems, I was having to perform some types of change manually, page by page... So after completing the changes across a few hundred pages, we looked at automating those, and eventually bought framescript, and complemented that with a couple of scripts we commissioned from Rick Quatro (Carmen Publishing). The scripts worked exactly as we needed, and completed correctly, in seconds, what would have required a few dozen hours of mind-numbingly repetitive work (where obviously I would have missed some changes, and been running into them periodically for months or years).

So in our case, I never learned a thing about framescript other than how to run a script, but it paid for itself in a few minutes. And as others have said, because of the hassle often involved in learning scripts, as long as you have an understanding boss (who will trust your judgement on which tasks are worth hiring out and not delay that process more than a day or two), in the long run the most efficient and least stressful option might be to order your scripts from a consultant; in our case, it allowed me to focus on the tasks I'm primarily hired to do, and to me, this solution to our problem we had was akin to waving a magic wand at it and making it go away, it was immensely satisfying.

Kevin Hunter