Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???

[Nina Rogers <janina -dot- rogers -at- gmail -dot- com>]

Good morning, Techwhirlers,

My company has developed an engineering textbook, and Yours Truly is to do
all of the editing and formatting. It's a great opportunity for me, but
I've never been on a project like this.

There are four authors who have been using Word MasterDocs for the book,
and they just sent me the files yesterday. I have not used Word MasterDocs
since, oh, 1998 or so. Back then, even though I was an "expert," I still
found it very clunky and unpredictable, particularly in the areas of
cross-references and indexing.

I would think that Word has improved its capacity to handle large documents
(this doc will be about 400 pages), but I don't know. I use Word all the
time, but not for things like this. I am wondering if it would be better to
put the book into FrameMaker--partly because I know FrameMaker is made for
this kind of document, and partly because I use FrameMaker all the time for
technical manuals.

I realize these are both older tools and there are probably many newer
tools available. I'd be interested in knowing what's out there and may
be better for this project, but at the same time I'd like to stick with
what I know/what software the company already has.

Any input/advice all of you have would be appreciated. Thanks!

Nina Rogers
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