Merging books: Need FM mechanisms and methodologies for merging books with large fraction of identical material

[Syed.Hosain at aeris.net]

> In addition, there is also the "possibility of migrating everything
from FM to Word" floating around at this particular client. So there is
never much point in making a big investment in FM book restructuring.

Argh ... they should re-think this "possibility".

While I had been an early FrameMaker user (1988 ... on a Sun 3/50 mono
system), I stopped using it circa 1991 or so (although I beta-tested FM
5 in Windows - pre Adobe days - some years after that).

In this company (joined in 1996), I used to do everything in Word and it
worked pretty well until my documents started exceeding 50 to 60 to 70
pages each. Then, the frustrations of repeat crashes, lost edits, Word's
insane attempts to "think" for me and apply formats, etc., just got to
me. I switched [back] to FrameMaker for everything larger than 50 pages
some years back - version 6.0 as I recall - and have been a much happier
person since. :)

Now, I still churn out the occasional short document spec in Word -
particular if it starts out that way from the technical person who gave
me the input. But anything that I *know* is going to be long and/or need
proper, consistent formatting, etc., gets done in FrameMaker. Some of
the other folks here also use Word and have problems. Our Marketing
department tech writer also switched to FrameMaker some time back.

The assumption that switching these documents to Word will somehow make
the tasks easier, is seriously flawed logic.

Z