best use of graphics in FM

[Sharon Burton]

What this co-worker is creating are unmaintainable documents. When they need
to be edited for the next version, it's going to take someone hours and
hours to change out one graphic that appears in 8 places. Days to edit the
copied text. The cost of making one small change to these documents can be
measured in hundreds of dollars. 10 minutes of changes become 3 days of
changes. 

I don't know if you have supervisory status in this situation, but a process
and Best Practices must be put in place. When running my own company and
when docs manager, I put these in place, trained the writers in them. After
that, anyone who created unmaintainable documents was fired. By me. Happily!



sharon

Sharon Burton
Content Strategy Consultant
951-369-8590
New book "8 Steps to Amazing Webinars" available on Amazon and BN.com
www.sharonburton.com
IM: sharonvburton at yahoo.com
Twitter: sharonburton
http://www.linkedin.com/in/sharonvburton


-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Combs, Richard
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 6:56 AM
To: Ken Poshedly; FrameMaker Users List
Subject: RE: best use of graphics in FM

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
------
rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-903-6372
------






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