Problems comparing large books: due to memory issues--or what?

[Fred Ridder]

You don't say which version of FrameMaker you are using, but I can tell you that in ever version of FrameMaker I have used on a daily basis (5.5.6 through 8.0), the compare documents feature has had some *significant* shortcomings.
 
And I'm sure you aren't going to welcome the news, but comparing tabular content has always been the weakest aspect of an already weak feature. Sometimes (on rare occasions, in my experience...), Frame will figure out what has changed inside a table, but most of the time it simply marks the whole table object as having been changed, which is basically useless. It's easy to understand why it might throw up its figurative hands when the number or arrangement of cells is different between two tables, but why it chokes when the tables are identically laid out and nearly identical in content is beyond me. 
 
Of course it's possible that some of this has been improved in FM9 or FM10. But I don't know about that because I'm stuck on FM8 for the time being. (I have a hard requirement to maintain backwards compatibilty with a team who are using the last version of FrameMaker for Solaris (7.0), and our corporate software licensing folks really, really don't like it when you try to have two different versions of the same tool on your system.) 
 
-Fred Ridder
 



From: marilyn.fausset at snia.org
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2012 18:36:59 +0000
Subject: Problems comparing large books: due to memory issues--or what?





I have been comparing several FM books (specs bound for ISO) that are large with lots of docs that contain many referenced Visio's and text insets. I have converted the text insets (MIFs full of tables) to text so table entries will compare. But the compare function is not consistently working. I either get a FM crash, an incomplete number of CMP files (missing CMP files when I know the file changed), or just plain incorrect CMP files (CMP file just mimics previous version). I do not need the Visio's to compare, but I do need table text to compare (show what's deleted/added).
 
I am looking to memory as a cause, and will try to compare some more after closing all other programs and functions, but I thought I'd check the list to see if anybody has experience with this. Normally I don't do book compares, but we are starting a new version of our spec, and reviewers have asked to see all changes indicated specifically--not just with change bars.
 
Thank you in advance!
PS: I have 3GB of memory, 32-bit operating system.
PPS: I have thought to compare PDFs, but I fear the markup would be horrendous and useless.
 
Marilyn
 
Marilyn Fausset
Senior Technical Writer
Storage Networking Industry Association 
www.snia.org   
 
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