[Framers] FrameMaker vs InDesign

[Tori Muir]

Again, based on painful personal experience I must respectfully disagree. *Production artists* can be trained to do things in a systematic and template-based fashion – they're thrilled to find built-in tools to make the whole process faster,  more consistent, and more maintainable. But true designers won't agree to learn it/won't retain it, or will only do it until you're no longer working with that company, at which point they will blissfully revert to creating the prettiest pages they can. 

Tori Muir
tmuir at spot-on-creative.com | 650.430.8674 | www.spot-on-creative.com 

On 6/24/17, 12:59 PM, "Framers on behalf of David Creamer" <framers-bounces+tmuir=spot-on-creative.com at lists.frameusers.com on behalf of IDEASlists at IDEAStraining.com> wrote:

    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,
    Illustrator, Flash, After Effects, Fireworks, Premiere
    Pro, Dreamweaver, Captivate, RoboHelp
    FrameMaker Certified since 1991, including structured XML
    Authorized QuarkXPress Instructor and Certified Expert since 1988
    Microsoft Office training, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access,
    Publisher, Project, and more
    FileMaker Business Alliance member: Trainer
    Authorized FlightCheck Instructor
    
    
    
    -----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!
    
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