Looking for an editable output from Frame 7.2

[Gillian Flato]

Just make it a PDF and then, in the PDF, click File > Send for Review.
Acrobat will make the PDF editable.

Caveat: You must possess Acrobat Professional 7.0 or greater. The editor
just needs the free Adobe Reader. 


Thank you,

Gillian Flato

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces+gflato=nanometrics.com at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces+gflato=nanometrics.com at lists.frameusers.com] On
Behalf Of Steve Rickaby
Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 6:00 AM
To: Greg Thompson
Subject: Re: Looking for an editable output from Frame 7.2

At 21:45 -0800 8/1/07, Greg Thompson wrote:

>  My current client wants me to provide them with output from the Frame
guide
>  I created for them in a format they can edit, not using Frame. Then
they
>  want to be able to re-publish these files (again, not using Frame)
and have
>  them look the same way they looked when I created them in Frame.

Why do they want to do this? Why cannot they buy Frame and learn it?
What do they want to use? (Wurd, no doubt...)

>  I am an experienced Frame user but not a guru and I doubt that what
they
>  want is possible.

It would certainly be hard, with a tendency toward impossibility unless
the document design is very simple.

It seems to be widely accepted that Mif2Go is best at producing RTF, so
I would expect that your most productive line of attack would be a
FrameMaker -> Mif2Go -> Word -> FrameMaker workflow. The last step would
almost certainly be a pain for you. There will be others on this group
that will have direct experience of this, so they may be able to provide
more concrete advice.

>  I know I can save Frame files as html, xml, text, or rtf and edit
them. But
>  I doubt that I can republish them and have them look like they did in
Frame
>  without using Frame

Your doubts are well-founded. FrameMaker's native export filters are...
ahem... suboptimal.

There's just a smattering of a chance that FrameMaker 8 might give
better support for Word round-tripping, but this is nothing more than
surmise on my part.

There is another way of looking at your problem. If your clients are
only interested in editing *content*, you should at least investigate
the possibility of constructing modular documents - that is, FrameMaker
documents whose text is imported (as text insets) from plain ASCII
files. That way, your clients could edit the ASCII files to their
heart's content, and you could then rebuild your FrameMaker document
using them.

Snags to this approach are:

. It doesn't directly support graphics

. The modular construction and lack of graphic support leaves text file
editors without global milestones (although they could cross-refer to a
PDF of the 'real' document)

. Text insets suffer from a few wrinkes, such as (in the case of plain
ASCII files) not supporting cross-references into them, and not
supporting character markup

However, as you suggest that your clients want to be able to republish
themselves, this idea is unlikely to help. I just hope your clients have
not fallen into the 'documentation is easy, our engineers can maintain
it' trap ;-)

-- 
Steve
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