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

[quills at airmail.net]

It better to estimate the worst case, rather than best case scenario. 
You could find that your conversion/merge goes much faster, in which 
case you are a hero. If you estimate too little and miss your delivery 
date, you are a villain.

If they go to Word, then there won't be any sharing of content. You will 
need to have two separate documents. Word doesn't play nicely with a 
complex or complicated format structure. And it isn't suited to 
conditional text, or referenced text.

Scott

Avraham Makeler wrote:
>> > I will jump in and mention that to avoid a deadline being missed,
> 
> Good point of course. I already insisted that this is something that 
> they must postpone until */after*/ the delivery deadline.
> 
>> > I would estimate the time for completion at 5 pages an hour.
> 
> Hmmm .. so that's 20 hours per 100 pages. So for the six books I list, 
> that's ~100 hrs = two weeks work. I hope it can be done a bit faster. 
> They are not going to like to hear 100 hours. 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.
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 6:32 PM, Avraham Makeler <amakeler at gmail.com 
> <mailto:amakeler at gmail.com>> wrote:
> 
>     > > For a two books to be combined, both approximately 100 pages, and
>     if I had no familiarity with them, I would estimate the time for
>     completion at 5 pages an hour.
> 
>     > > and if I had no familiarity with them
> 
>     The SME said he will be doing the job of marking (in a PDF or in a
>     Word export) which blocks are shared. So then I "just" have to put
>     those marked blocks in a shared area or add conditional text constructs.
> 
>     avi
> 
>