Flare vs Frame

[Fei Min Lorente]

Hi Paul:

Yes, you can go from FrameMaker to .chm files, but I would recommend
using something like Mif2Go or WebWorks ePublisher because the native
FrameMaker conversion has never been that robust. However, Adobe just
released FrameMaker 10, so maybe it's better.

For an online review environment, I've been using Adobe Acrobat 9 with
my FrameMaker 7.2 files and the reviewers are happy. They don't have to
have FrameMaker, and Acrobat has a reasonably good interface for
reviewing. (You can share the PDF so that reviewers can see each others'
comments as soon as they click on the Publish button.) In FrameMaker 9,
you can also import the comments from the PDF into FrameMaker and they
appear as conditional text that you can accept or reject at your
leisure. I'm not sure this is available in FrameMaker 8. 

Yes, I totally support your effort to use anything but Word to produce
the HTML files.

Sorry I don't know anything about Flare.

Fei Min

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Paul Carr
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2011 8:18 AM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Flare vs Frame

Folks,

At my new contract, they have Word (och!) and want to output to compiled
html (by which I assume they mean .chm).  They think.

My audience is support folks for internal software.

They think that they want to stay with Word for the source files
because, down the road, anyone will be able to maintain the source
files, since everyone knows Word.

I would like to convince them to switch to Flare or Frame 8.

I think that they might agree to switch if I can show them that it would
be worth it.

I told them that Frame would make the development of the .chm-friendly
content much easier than Word, because of Frame's advanced x-ref
options, for one thing. I believe that I can go from Frame to .chm.
Never did it before.

I am not familiar with Flare, so I could not "sell" Flare per se.

Also, a key selling point would be writing software that would provide
an online review environment in which the SMEs could make tracked
changes to my document, and I could then accept or change or ignore
their changes at my leisure.  

I do not see that Flare provides an online review environment for SMEs.
Framemaker 8 did not provide this. I am not familiar with Frame 9.

Could anyone offer any guidance on this?

Thanks.

best,
Paul
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