best use of graphics in FM

[Combs, Richard]

Ken Poshedly wrote:

> Unfortunately, at his prior location, another FM user (more
> knowledgeable than my coworker) showed my coworker what I call a "hack"
> to get a document done in a fraction of the time that it would
> ordinarily take. Specifically, he uses "PrintScreen32" to take screen
> shots of existing graphics in the Word or pdf Chinglish books we get
> from the home office and then pastes them directly into his FM
> document. No muss, no fuss -- and no record of any filename or any
> other details about any of the graphics in his documents.
> 
> He also does this with text blocks (sometimes entire pages) from the
> Chinglish books and simply pastes those text blocks into his FM
> documents. The results are  horrendous because no real editing can be
> done (and errors in the original text abound). He simply creates small
> FrameMaker text blocks over incorrect words or sentences and types in
> the few words or sentences needed to fix something. So his FM documents
> are pretty much "pictures" of text with white boxes of corrected words
> that give his pages that "ransom-letter look".

Reasonable people can disagree about whether the long-term benefits of referenced graphics (updating is practically effortless) are worth a little more time and process up front. I'm firmly in the import by reference camp myself. 

But no reasonable person -- no competent, sane person -- would paste screen shots of text into a doc! How is this even a time-saver over copying and pasting the text itself? 

Pick your battles. Agree to disagree on the graphics, but tell your cow-orker that "pictures" of text are an abomination, a maintenance nightmare, a sign of computer illiteracy, and simply can't be tolerated. 

Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-903-6372
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