[Framers] FrameMaker vs InDesign

[David Creamer]

That is just a result of poor training. It may or may not be the designer's
fault--most likely the company/manager is to blame by not providing the
training or enforcing a professional workflow.

In my experience, once a designer sees the advantages of using based-on
master pages, text styles, and object styles, they will be happy to switch
over. This is especially true for large projects like a book.


David Creamer
IDEAS Training
ADOBE Authorized Instructor & Certified Expert since 1994
Training on: Acrobat, LiveCycle Designer, InDesign, InCopy, Photoshop,
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Pro, Dreamweaver, Captivate, RoboHelp
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Microsoft Office training, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access,
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-----Original Message-----
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!