Madcap and FrameMaker?

[quills at airmail.net]

They are two entirely different animals. The marketing hoopla from 
MadCap would have you believe that Flare is a direct competitor to 
FrameMaker. This is not true.

MadCap products are transformational tools, primarily. Their entire 
cause for being was centered around transforming formatted text 
intended for print, into online help files, generally through 
transformation into XHTML files. What is telling is that the primary 
authoring tools they cite for documentation are Word and FrameMaker. 
I've used Flare, and I find it very difficult to manipulate.

Whether that's because I'm very comfortable using a fully functional 
and validating text editor for making XHTML or because I feel it's 
easier to hand code XHTML instead of using MadCap's GUI, is up for 
interpretation. I do know that what took me 20 minutes to change (a 
bullet list) in MadCap only took me 30 seconds using Oxygen text 
editor.

Scott

At 9:15 AM +0100 10/30/08, Wim Hooghwinkel - idtp wrote:
>Lately I read some postings on MadCap products. I'm not familiair with
>those, just wondering how MadCap compares to FrameMaker. Is it competive
>with Framemaker (Adobe Tech Com Suite) or is it, can it be, additional in a
>tech doc authoring and publishing workflow.
>