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

Subject: Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???
From: "Peter Neilson" <neilson -at- windstream -dot- net>
To: "Gene Kim-Eng" <techwr -at- genek -dot- com>, "Nina Rogers" <janina -dot- rogers -at- gmail -dot- com>
Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2021 14:45:46 -0400

The only difficulty I've seen with Framemaker is that sometimes there is pushback from part of a team who say, "But all we know is Word. It has to stay in Word so we can edit it." Of course if it stays in Word, then someone will push it through Master Doc in spite of the warnings from a a quarter-century of Bad Experiences. (Jeez, I can hardly believe it's been that long. When I first experienced the Master Doc mess I was certain that it would all get sorted out in a year or two. "Those MS folks are good. Shouldn't be any problem to get it working right." Yeah. Right.)

If the doc winds up being maintained in both FM and Word you'll be in trouble. Cut it all over to FM and store the Word version in a closet. Nailed shut.

To use FM, get all the appropriate people trained in FM, including getting them equipment that can handle FM editing easily. A few years ago I found that a dual-monitor setup was best. Have not used it recently. Try to avoid having separate teams fighting over the correct way to do it.

On Wed, 20 Oct 2021 14:26:03 -0400, Nina Rogers <janina -dot- rogers -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

Thanks for all of your feedback.

Based on what everyone has written, and my feedback from a few friends who
are tech writers, it's looking like FrameMaker may be my best bet. Word
appears to still be somewhat glitchy when it comes to MasterDocs and large
documents, and InDesign is not something I have any experience with, so
there would be big learning curve there.

I'll add a few more details about the project, and if anyone sees any red
flags, I'd appreciate more feedback on that. To keep everyone else from
being bored with Word/FrameMaker talk, feel free to email me privately. :)

The book will be between 400-500 pages with 16 chapters, each of which
currently has between five and ten level-2 subheadings. (As I read through
it, I'm seeing a need for L3 and even L4 subheadings.) There are scores of
figures, tables, and mathematical equations throughout, all of which are
labeled and cross-referenced at least once (and often multiple times) in
the book. There is also a lengthy appendix (case studies, included in the
page count I gave earlier) and, of course, a TOC and an index. The current
version has no table of tables or table of figures, but we may add that
because there are so many. If we add more heading levels, we may also have
a single-level TOC followed by a more detailed, multi-level TOC. That may
not happen, but it's a possibility. So, lots of cross-referencing, math
equation text (I see that FrameMaker has a "MathML Equation" feature, which
is new to me but looks like what I would use for the equations.

I may keep the doc in Word for initial editing purposes (since the head
writer may also want to go into it and make revisions), and then more it to
FrameMaker for both layout and establishing all of the cross-references.
The cross-references will be a big job, but it might be better to approach
those separately from the editing.

Thanks again for your responses. If you have further ideas/input after
reading the above, I'm all ears!

Nina

On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 1:40 PM Gene Kim-Eng <techwr -at- genek -dot- com> wrote:

My experience has been that Word master docs stumble most on numbered
subheadings, which is something you usually see mostly in procedural
documents. If your cross-references aren't trying to link to things like
"section x.xx, steps y-z" in different sub docs, you'll probably be ok
with Word.

Gene Kim-Eng


On 10/20/2021 5:16 AM, Nina Rogers wrote:
> 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.
>

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Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Nina Rogers
Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Gene Kim-Eng
Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???: From: Nina Rogers

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