InDesign as a replacement for Framemaker
Graeme R Forbes
Graeme.Forbes at Colorado.EDU
Fri Sep 12 01:18:06 PDT 2008
Well, I've started to move from FM to ID, so that I do not remain
forever stuck with G5 hardware and Tiger. It's with immense
reluctance that I reward Adobe with more purchases after they dropped
MacFM...no, let's not get started on that.
The ID learning curve is much steeper. I bought FM3 in 1992/3 and
immediately started writing a book in it, picking things up as I went
along (need an idea for Xmas presents? -- Modern Logic by Graeme
Forbes -- every home should have one). I don't think you could do
that with ID -- hors categorie compared to category 3, Alpe d'Huez vs
the foothills of the Jura.
Anyway, I've done a few short docs, and am slowly, with many
expletives deleted, getting the hang of it. I don't use the features
Dov mentioned -- structure, conditional text, equation editor -- but
maybe you can get a lot of FM functionality with 3rd party plug-ins.
For me, the lack of xrefs was a deal-breaker until I discovered that
DTP Tools, an FM-knowledgeable company, has a plug-in that appears to
cover, or even improve on, FM's functionality. It's 99 euros, so
assuming they bill you in euros, the dollar price is steadily
dropping at the moment.
One thing that bugs me are the ludicrous file sizes. A two-page
abstract, entirely text, came in at 1.2MB. An FM equivalent would be
around 28K, which was what the pdf I made from the 1.2MB file also
came in at. I haven't been able to find anything online about why the
files are so big or what, if anything, you can do about it (issues
about graphics are irrelevant in my case).
An attractive feature of ID for me is that it's got correctly
implemented footnoting. No more text frames in anchored frames and
trial-and-error guessing about how much to cut to get the remainder
to jump back to the right page, then having to redo it all when you
realize you've made an appalling error on p.2 and fixing it changes
all subsequent page breaks.
So: although ID isn't specifically intended for writing technical
documents, nothing appears to make it irrational to use it for that.
Make a list of what FM features are important/indispensable, and
check that ID can do the same. Then go to Configure Plug-ins and
disable all the ones that pertain to the production of eye-candy only.
One really maddening issue is "activation". A single-user license
only lets you have 2 activations, so if like me you have a home
desktop, an office desktop, and a laptop, something has to give. I'm
going to try to appeal to Adobe's sense of natural justice to get a
third activation for my laptop. Pray for me.
It would be very useful if there were a book, or even if someone just
had personal notes they were willing to share, about ID from the FM-
user's point of view: the sort of thing that would say, you can do
such-and-such in FM easily enough, here's a sequence of steps in ID
that will also accomplish it.
Graeme Forbes
More information about the framers
mailing list