Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf in the UK made a very compelling presentation on the Changing Nature of Content in a recent webinar with Adobe. There is a webinar recording, and a detailed white paper (authored by Pratt) which you can download on this subject. NOTE: both of the links in the previous sentence will take read more…
Tables are relatively simple to create with Word, but compared to FrameMaker tables they would not be classified as “sturdy.” For years tables have been one of the strongest features in FrameMaker, in large part due to the degree that customers have “stretched the envelope” with complex, high page count projects that required tables with read more…
In conversion projects, time is often the limiting factor. Even if you really feel the entire 500-page manual should be converted to DITA or some other structure, you might be stuck with the old materials for a long time to come. And while you are hacking away at the old document, changing details in the read more…
One of the most common complaints I have heard from Microsoft Word users is the amount of time they spend trying to reposition “slippery” graphics that fall off of the page near a page break. With effort, it is possible to create a true anchored frame to control an image somewhat, but the choices for read more…
FrameMaker 11 has a long history of creating multiple versions of documents or projects to address different audiences, and similar but slightly different product lines. For at least two decades, FrameMaker users have been able to use conditional text control to issue different, custom versions of documents from a single set of “base” source documents. read more…
There is a a considerable contrast between Microsoft Word and FrameMaker regarding the way that styles, catalogs and removal of format overrides are handles. Word displays character styles (e.g. emphasized words) and paragraph styles (e.g. lists of headings) together in one style catalog. FrameMaker has a separate catalog for: paragraph styles character styles table styles read more…
Amongst the many compelling reasons for upgrading from FrameMaker 7.x to FrameMaker 11, real “out-of-the-box” DITA support would surely be near the top of the list. Although FrameMaker 7.x was a competent and potent structured editor in its day, it was developed before most major milestones in DITA development and approval were achieved. A timeline read more…
Sideheads are most frequently seen in a traditional resume. Sideheads, with headings placed in the outer page margins, are relatively easy to accomplish with Microsoft Word, if the heading is only one line long and has no long breaks. Multi-line sideheads in Word are quite another story. This is one feature that stands in stark read more…
Many jobs are tedious, involving a repetitive sequence of commands that must be executed on a large number of almost identical elements in a document. And because they are tedious and feel like a waste of time on the part of the author, attention may decrease and errors may go unnoticed. This, apart from the increase in read more…
FrameMaker 11’s structured editing features and XML support have come a long way from the model introduced ten years ago with FrameMaker 7.0. That earlier release of FrameMaker combined two earlier separate products (Regular FrameMaker and FrameMaker+SGML), granting customers a “two-for-one” authoring solution; every copy of FrameMaker 7.x could produce either traditional unstructured documents, or read more…
