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Jessica Nealon reports: <<I currently have a situation where I maintain
technical specifications on the back of one document
that are also required to be in the user guide - one is in Adobe PageMaker
and the other is in Adobe FrameMaker. The process is error-prone and I would
like to keep this information in one place but have it output to two
places.>>
Piece of cake. Store the information in a program that lets you export the
information with the columns of information separated by tabs. (The keyboard
key, not the binder thing. <g>) Word works just fine for this, particularly
if you just use tabs rather than an actual table; databases and spreadsheets
let you export their contents as tab-delimited text, which accomplishes the
same goal.
Maintain the information (keep it up to date) in any of this software, and
whenever you need to update the two manuals, simply import the table of data
into PM and Frame. If you create a standard paragraph style called "table
element" now, you can apply this style subsequently to the imported data in
a single step and automatically align and format the text.
If you're more adventurous, you could try linking to the file that contains
the source material, but I don't trust this method and find that it leads to
more overhead in the layout files.
<<I am currently researching Adobe Table 3.0>>
Avoid it. Though it's good enough at what it does, what it does isn't
pretty. <g> More importantly, it creates far more work than necessary and
provides no advantages over my suggestion.
<<The PageMaker info is not in a table but the FrameMaker info is.>>
Why not turn them both into tables? Consistency is a good thing.
--Geoff Hart, geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
(try ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca if you get no response)
Forest Engineering Research Institute of Canada
580 boul. St-Jean
Pointe-Claire, Que., H9R 3J9 Canada
"Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the
earth's surface relative to other matter; second, telling other people to do
so. The first is unpleasant and ill-paid; the second is pleasant and highly
paid."--Bertrand Russell
