Framemaker Uses

[Jerilynne Knight]

Hi Deirdre

I've used Frame since 1992 for a variety of different products, including
tons of white papers, manuals, training guides, technical marketing
materials, policies, procedures, reports, spec sheets and the like. During
the past few years, I've focused on using unstructured Frame for single
sourced projects with multiple outputs such as print documentation, online
help, print-friendly PDFs, online-friendly PDFs, etc. All the documents I've
created have relied heavily on numbering, cross-referencing, consistency in
terminology, have short creation deadlines and even shorter editing
deadlines.

For one document, a user guide of over 6500 pages, we were able to turn on a
dime when we had over 2500 pages completed...we strictly enforced the use of
character and paragragh tags, variables and cross references. When the
client's legal time wanted the product name to always have a trademark, it
was changed within minutes of the request. And when a manager decided we
absolutely *must* use different formatting for the keys pressed, it was
completed in minutes and all remaining content was matched to the new
standards with no muss, no fuss.

I can't say I would use for products that required fine layout techniques
and especially not for documents with heavy footnoting requirements. It
positively sucks for those!

My most recent project is using Frame to single source a series of policies
and procedures for over 18 plants. The materials are at least 50-60%
reusable and we're using standard, unstructured Frame features to handle the
changes that are made on a plant by plant basis. Although the end users
protested at first, they were won over when they found out about the neat
new things they could get (everything from not being responsible for writing
and maintaining the content to hotlinked references to the relevant
regulatory local, state, and federal codes!

Hope this helps
Jerilynne Knight
Simply Written, Inc.