Frame vs. Flare for My Needs

[Kevin Ryan]

Thanks for the warning, Steve.  I know Word files can be difficult to manage and easy to abuse.  For example, my experience has been that many if not most Word users don't use Word styles properly (assuming they even know they exist).

 My company provides large-scale Customer Information Systems for individual utility companies.   The requestors of Word content in our case are typically reasonably Word-savvy educators/trainer's in either the utility or in partner companies with which we work closely during the project management phase.   Your warnings of possible backfires are well noted, though.  If I can reach the point of being able to provide Word-equivalent manuals alongside our primary deliverable — Frame-to-PDF guides — I will make a point to qualify that the Word version is being provided as a courtesy, that Word may be inferior to the PDF in some ways, and that my company is not responsible for how the Word content is used.

Kevin

-----Original Message-----
From: Steve Rickaby [mailto:srickaby at wordmongers.demon.co.uk]
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2015 6:13 AM
To: Kevin Ryan; framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Frame vs. Flare for My Needs

At 20:21 +0000 25/2/15, Kevin Ryan wrote:

>Our customers (utilities) have been requesting another MS Word output:  Editable MS Word versions of our 20-300 page PDF manuals so that they can edit them for their own purposes (such as internal training).

This has been an interesting and informative discussion, but I think there is a tangential issue. Please forgive me if this is inappropriate to your specific circumstances, but I think what is being requested here is a Very Bad Thing.

I have been through this sort of loop in the past, with customers requesting manual content in Word 'so that it can be updated by our engineers'. The problems are (at least) fourfold:

. Word is unforgiving, and despite a popular belief outside of documentation engineering that anything in Word is easy, requires a high level of Word skills to produce professional output. Word lacks the tightness of control of FrameMaker, and can often behave in an unpredictable fashion, particularly with long and/or complex documents.

. Development engineers generally lack documentation engineering skills (a sweeping statement, I know, and not always true, but something to be aware of). They will almost certainly lack advanced Word skills.

. It is not impossible that the end result will be poor quality output after editing that still carries your company's details, reflecting badly on you.

. Should this occur, it is also not impossible that you maybe called in to sort out the resulting mess, landing you in an unsupported FrameMaker -> Word -> FrameMaker scenario. Way a ways back, Interleaf used to offer Word round-tripping, but that is all ancient history now afaik.

I am only advising caution.

--
Steve
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