Remote reviewers, document markup, FrameMaker?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Rebecca Stevenson wondered: <<Our sparkly new doc group, having committed to
single-sourcing with Frame/WWP, now finds itself pondering the best way to
distribute files for review. Since many of our reviewers will be remote,
hard copy is not a workable option; the files have to be e-mailed out.>>

I'm not familiar with Frame/WWP other than through reading about them here
on techwr-l, so I can't provide software-specific advice. One piece of
general advice I can provide is to be very careful about a "one size fits
all" approach. One of the keys to successful reviews involves providing the
source material in the reviewer's preferred format. Some reviewers love
onscreen editing; others refuse to even consider a solution that doesn't
involve paper. Some want you to talk to them about their mother-in-law for
half an hour before discussing the review orally--not in print, not
onscreen. Really! Been there, done that...

Sending the wrong material to a reviewer makes it harder for them to do the
job right; it's just one more obstacle or irritant for them to overcome. If
you can remove an obstacle by tailoring the solution to their needs, thereby
minimizing the distractions that interfere with good reviews, why not do so?
Speaking of which, if the documents are large, don't even consider sending
the whole document at once. Send it in little chunks. This removes an
enormous intimidation factor ("My God! She sent me 1000 pages to review!")
and lets reviewers focus their finite amounts of concentration and mental
energy on discrete chunks.

<<The options seem to be: save as RTF from Frame (which seems to hit snags
at a certain doc size; can anyone advise on this?) or buy everyone a copy of
Acrobat so they can comment up PDFs.>>

Acrobat Business Tools might be a good solution, but I'm told it's been
discontinued. Maybe you can find some copies from a software clearance
house? But given that you're working in Frame/WWP, why not investigate a
solution based on HTML files? One really efficient way to remotely edit Web
sites involves saving the files to your hard disk in HTML (easy to do from
most browsers), then using revision tracking in Word to mark up the edits.
The author simply copies your edits into the actual HTML of the Web page.

Frame must have comparable facilities; if not, any Web authoring tool,
including "FrontPage Express" (distributed free with many current versions
of Windows) let you open the HTML files and do your edits there. All you
need to do is color the edits (using a custom style or the software's
built-in font color tools) to highlight edits. This approach lets you post
the documents to be reviewed on a private (unlinked) part of your Web site
so everyone can download them via their browser.

--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada 

Hofstadter's Law--"The time and effort required to complete a project are
always more than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's
Law."

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