Replacing Framemaker

[Bill Briggs]

At 12:43 PM +0000 2/1/07, Steve Rickaby wrote:
>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.

 I did this exact thing at Macworld a few years ago. It was the desktop pub shootout, or some such title. There was a Quark expert, an ID expert, and me driving FrameMaker. We took turns doing things that showed the application's "stuff" and challenged the others to match it. MS Word wasn't even invited to the shootout as it wasn't considered a contender.

 All things considered, FrameMaker held its ground against the others. It couldn't match the typography of ID, and was not as graceful at doing magazine style layout with lots of graphics, but it kicked some butt in the area where we all know it shines, like number streams, cross references, conditional text, etc.

 There was no clear winner. It came down to choosing the right tool for the job. Of course ID and Quark were fighting for supremacy in the same DTP space. FrameMaker has a feature set that focuses on other things. But it held its own.

 My most vivid memory of the shootout was the audible gasp from Jay (who was driving Quark) when, with a couple of keystrokes, I imported an image into a table cell. Apparently that wasn't easy to do in Quark at that time.

 But then we all know the virtues of FrameMaker.

- web