[Framers] FrameMaker vs InDesign

[Rick Quatro]

All good points about InDesign and people not using styles, etc. One other issue about indexes: I happen to be working on a 438 page InDesign book today and I started generated the index about an hour and fifteen minutes ago and it still hasn't finished. I am working on a machine with a Xeon process and 64 gigs of RAM!

Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: Framers [mailto:framers-bounces+rick=rickquatro.com at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Tori Muir
Sent: Friday, June 23, 2017 3:15 PM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: [Framers] FrameMaker vs InDesign

Regrettably, that isn't necessarily true. A lot of the folks who use InD are first and foremost *designers*, and have no qualms about hand-formatting everything on the page to produce a lovely composition. It can be very difficult to get users with that mindset to switch to a structure-based/formats-driven viewpoint. Additionally, a huge number of the InD users I've worked with/trained in long document work can't even set up an auto-bulleted paragraph, let alone autonumbering, and I shudder to think what would happen if they tried indexing. 

I would qualify the below statement by saying that if they are already using InD the way one needs to use Frame, you'll have no problem training them. If, on the other hand, their preferred approach is to use InD the way one might use Illustrator, you're in for a rough ride. I'll never forget the time a client had me update the InD files for their product catalog: 235 pages containing ~800 products, a TOC and an  index, without a single paragraph/character format defined, no generated TOC or index, no book files, not even auto-connected text flows from page to page. The most advanced thing they'd done was add a page number to the master page.  But the catalog *looked* lovely!

Tori Muir