[Framers] Why so many of us feel the way we do about Adobe

[Bertrand Meyer]

This is an old thread but here is a comment. I fundamentally rely on FrameMaker and would never "bash" it. On the other hand, right now at the end of a two-year book-writing process, with the camera-ready due on Monday, I got a crash this afternoon. Not the first -- in my experience, if I am working on a book a FrameMaker session does not last more than three or four days before it vanishes  --  but possibly the worst ever. The supposed recovery files were corrupted; just to restart from the backup to a stable state took almost two hours. I do back up obsessively (as I have been burned many times before), but still. And when you are in delicate fine-tuning, typo-fixing and final indexing mode, working over several chapters at once, going through every recent change to see which were kept and which were lost, is a nightmare. 

One might imagine that by this time they would have either fixed the crashes or devised a decent recovery mechanism.

There is still nothing that measures up to FrameMaker for writing books with a sophisticated structure, but if it did respect the integrity of customers' work that wouldn't hurt.

-- Bertrand Meyer

-----Original Message-----
From: Framers [mailto:framers-bounces+bertrand.meyer=inf.ethz.ch at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Shmuel Wolfson
Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2021 12:00
To: Framers List <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Subject: Re: [Framers] Why so many of us feel the way we do about Adobe

I don't know why everyone likes bashing FrameMaker.

Is there anything else that:
• Is suitable for long books.
• Gives you PDF output as is appears while you are working (WYSIWYG).
• Can be converted to online help, (even if it requires buying an extra program).

FM happens to have online help conversion built-in, but I could live without that if that was another decent authoring tool that worked together with another decently priced conversion tool.

Word comes close to checking all those boxes, but has problems with large files and other issues.

Someone mention another page layout program recently, but I forgot what it was. Maybe it was Xara Page & Layout Designer. But can it do online help at all?

Please post if you know of another authoring tool that is excellent for PDFs and can be used for online help.

My biggest gripe with FM is the price, but you know what, you really don't need to buy every new version that comes out. Do you buy every new smartphone that comes out, or wait until you need a new phone? Anyone under 20 is excluded from answering that question :)

--
Shmuel Wolfson
Technical Writer
058-763-7133

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