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> Can anyone offer any wisdom? Has Quark made up the gap, and is FrameMaker
> really soon to be obsolete?
Quark and Frame are different animals for sure. Quark is a great tool for
layout and design, and the wide range of available Xtensions provide
functionality way beyond the basic application. Frame is far superior for
long documents and technical publications, and the FDK (and third party apps
like FrameScript) permits serious automation and customization.
For book publishers, depending on the project, Quark may have definite
advantages. If a book is design intensive, especially if it contains a lot
of 4-color (or more) work, Quark would undoubtedly prove to be more
efficient. Hence, it's widespread use among magazine, brochure, newpaper,
and art book publishers.
However, for any sort of 'typical' book format (if there is such a thing),
Frame would be the tool of choice. I would also agree with other respondants
that FrameMaker is not going to go away anytime in the near future. In fact,
I suspect Frame's user base is increasing as users migrate from Word and
from high end (ie - expensive) applications like Interleaf and Arbortext.
IMO, Adobe's decision to roll Frame and Frame+SGML into a single product
also solidifies it's place in the market.
In either case, where lots of color work is involved, the platform of choice
would be Mac.
Hope this helps.
ciao,
John
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
John Root
Publishing Systems
jroot -at- publisys -dot- com
---------
Custom Publishing Solutions
---------------- http://www.publisys.com
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