So Long and Thanks for the Fish -- Migrating from FrameMaker to Flare

[grant at hedgewizard.net]

My biggest kvetch about all the structured doc tools I've seen (and I've been
using them as far back as IBM's "BookMaster") is that they generally output like
sausage machines.
All the text is simply extruded onto the page, with no awareness of how people
read documents or process information.

It is true that s ome output processors/digesters can be "instructed" on how to
handle things such as widows and orphans, and even some semi-intelligent
hyphenation.  But none of them (in my experience) produce layouts anywhere as
near good as what even a moderately-educated human can do. (kerning, leading,
knowing what chunks need to stay together to be useful, etc. )

Their output is "OK" for very small chunk information like help pages, but
dreadful for any document that requires more than that.
I'm not completely opposed to them; using such tools  helps writing teams
standardize things --- and DITA (as a philosophy of information organization)
does help rationalize what can otherwise be messy organization. And they can
help with reuse (but not as much as you might think, once you start factoring in
the overhead of finding the resuable chunks, and then writing around them so
that they don't read like an undigested lump in the middle of your prose!)

Grant

> On October 29, 2013 at 9:30 AM Rick Quatro <rick at rickquatro.com> wrote:
>
>
> Mike's comment is interesting light of the fact that many people are moving
> away from WSIWYG "in this century." The whole XML-authoring world, with DITA,
> S1000D, DocBook, etc., is a move away from WSIWYG authoring tools.
> Increasingly, authoring content is being separated from rendering it for
> output (for example, with applications like Flare). In a sense, we are going
> full circle back to the division of labor that existing in the typesetting
> era. That is why there may be a revival in the LaTex world: it has always
> separated authoring and rendering.
>
> Rick Quatro
>
> ➢ Isn't LaTex a non-WYSIWYG application, though? I can't imagine working that
> way in this century. I don't think I've done that since Wordstar. :)
>
> ➢ Mike Wickham
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