Long time FrameMaker maven and trainer, Barb Binder of Rocky Mountain Training, was our recent webinar guest in a lively session entitled “FrameMaker 11 Classroom in a Book: meet the author, see it on iPad!” In this engaging interview, Barb revealed what led her to write the book in the first place, and the reception […]
#WriteRight 4) FrameMaker & Word: Using Cross References
Cross References provide one of the most dramatic contrasts between Word and FrameMaker 11. It is possible to create an xref to a page number, Figure, Table or paragraph in Word. But it requires a string of cross references to achieve what appears to be a complex sentence with reference to a Table, the title, […]
Part (5) Reasons to upgrade from FM 7.x to FM 11: Where were you in 2002?
Midway through our series of blogs on reasons to upgrade from FrameMaker 7.x, we take a quick trip back to the year of that software’s birth: 2002. A lot can change in 11 years. Not just styles, fads, fashions, but the fundamental way that we communicate. Despite the almost nostalgic communication methods of 10 years […]
Part (4) Reasons to upgrade from FM 7.x to FM 11: Catalogs and Format Overrides
Speaking from my over one thousand hours of experience “optimizing” unstructured FrameMaker files for translation and localization, I can vouch for the following fact: FrameMaker 11’s ability to handle catalog styles more efficiently than FrameMaker 7.x and its ability search and locate format overrides can reduce some production preparation tasks by as much as 90%! […]
Telling Your Manager to #WriteRight
“We left Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint off the survey because they are so ubiquitous in the IT industry. In past surveys over 90% of respondents indicated using Word.“ – 2012 WritersUA User Assistance Tools Survey Word is one of the most pervasive and widely used documentation tool in the world. It however does not meet […]
Changing the engine without stopping the car (part 2)
In the first part of this 2-part article, I explained how mixing structured with unstructured content in the same publication process was vital to the success of several conversion projects I have undertaken in the past years. It is simply not feasible for a company to stop for months while rewriting their legacy documentation or converting all […]
Webinar roundup: Going global with FrameMaker
During my 15 years in the translation industry, I learned a lot about how seemingly small things can magnify project costs when FrameMaker documents are translated into other languages. To this end, AdobeTCS recently held 2 webinars that addressed different aspects of optimizing both FrameMaker content and post-translation review. Even if you are not yet […]
Part (3) Reasons to upgrade from FM 7.x to FM 11: Track changes and Import PDF comments
Versions of FrameMaker after FrameMaker 7.2 introduced two potent features that could be reason alone to upgrade to FrameMaker 11: (a) track changes and (b) ability to import PDF review comments and annotations “in place” in the source FrameMaker document. Both of the features streamline the edit and review process substantially. Sample documents used for […]
#WriteRight 3) FrameMaker & Word: Page Layout and Master Pages
Our third “video blog” on FrameMaker 11 for Word users focuses on the dynamics of page layout. This is possibly one of the areas in “basic” FrameMaker where feature advantages over Word are most pronounced. Since Word was originally developed as a personal, productivity word processor on a platform (PC with DOS) that did not […]
#WriteRight 2) FrameMaker & Word: Page Headers/Footers
This is the second in our series of blogs that highlight key differences between Microsoft Word and FrameMaker 11. Simple page headers and footers show a dramatic contrast between product capabilities. FrameMaker 11 page headers update in real time A major difference between the two products is the lack of manual updates required to update […]