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Re: FrameMaker 11 and 9 - Doc Team expansion, help
Subject:Re: FrameMaker 11 and 9 - Doc Team expansion, help From:Chris Despopoulos <despopoulos_chriss -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 15 Aug 2012 01:58:19 -0700 (PDT)
Gene says:
>>I've never had a document go through MIF without needing some kind of
>>tweaking to fix something that didn't translate correctly.
Interesting. I've never had a document go through MIF without FIXING some kind of problem. I've never needed to tweak anything. The only issue is that newer forms of MIF support things that older versions of the product do not. But then, part of the value of MIF is that it's a "loose" language. If you open a document that has garbage MIF in it (or unsupported features), Maker will do its best to continue. The only way to get in trouble is if you make bad references to anchored frames, or improper tables (can crash). But that can only happen if you're creating MIF from scratch (I've had customers do this)... Saving a doc as MIF will not put you in that situation.
In fact, MIF is so cool that in the old days Frame Technology would automatically save as MIF on pre-release versions so the doc department could use Alpha software and still do production work. Even if they had to change the complete file format (and sometimes they did), the MIF documents were safe. And so, when I was lucky enough to see an early version of Maker, I created a plugin that automatically saves as MIF... I still keep it running -- makes me feel warm and fuzzy, and disk space these days certainly permits.
Now an interesting topic is why would Maker include MIF 70 as a save-as option? Probably something to do with character encoding? But I'm not privy to the reasoning behind that decision. If anybody has insight, please do tell.
Then Gene says:
>>If the likely scenario is all but one person on FM9, I'd get the new person
>>FM9 so everyone using FM is on the same tool set.
Sounds practical to me. Certainly, the employer would rather see things that way. So unless you have a road map that relies on things in Maker 11, you would have a hard sell to do otherwise. That said, you should probably acquaint yourself with Maker 11 and the other TCS features. This is probably the most significant upgrade to come along in a while.
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