[Framers] Frame vs InDesign

[Robert Lauriston]

InDesign has been the standard in book publishing and color prepress
since it pushed Quark out. It's great at generating TOCs and indexes.
PDFs are as good as they get, that's the format graphics professionals
use to send books etc. to the printer. You can read up on links and
cross-references in the doc PDF, which is an example of its PDF
output.

https://helpx.adobe.com/pdf/indesign_reference.pdf

(Note that some of the links won't work as they're trying to find
stuff that's installed with InDesign on your hard disk.)

There's a third--party tool for converting FrameMaker to InDesign:

https://www.dtptools.com/product.asp?id=mfid

It's not a single-sourcing tool. No online help. You can publish to
HTML but if that's important you'd probably want to use something
else.

On Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 3:28 PM Frank Ripp <fripp at pacificbiosciences.com> wrote:
>
> New management is pushing for the overall use of InDesign for marketing collateral and technical documentation at my company.
> I'm a long time Frame user, producing a set of software documentation ranging from release notes, installation guides, API guides, and a 160-page user guide. All are delivered as PDF files.
>
> I've been asked to figure out whether or not InDesign will fit my documentation needs, and have many questions.
>
>   *   Most importantly: Can InDesign generate good PDF files, with working links?
>   *   Is InDesign good for large documents (100-160 pages), with TOCs, and lots of internal and external cross-references?
>   *   Can I transfer my existing paragraph and character styles from Frame to InDesign?
>   *   Can I import a Frame book into InDesign?
>
> Has anyone out there successfully switched from Frame to Indesign?
> Is this a non-starter for the type of documents I produce?