WORD vs FRAMEMAKER

[Denise Beaudoin <denise -at- TECSYS -dot- COM>]

To all,

Thank you muchly for the many responses I received from a message I
recently posted, regarding the tools and processes used to produce
documentation, both online and offline.  I have not yet compiled this
information, but will do so shortly,should any of you be interested in
receiving a copy.

Since I did not mention the platforms I would be using to author, I
did receive a lot of cross-platform ideas.  This has allowed me to
keep an open mind, since the development platform (that is, DOS or
Unix) has not yet been decided.  (We currently do the help on Unix
and the doc on DOS.)

The major contenders to the race appear to be Word and Framemaker.

Some very important criteria (for me) are:
*  Must be able to produce professional looking documentation;
*  Must be able to handle large volumes;
*  Must allow me to transform certain sections of the help into
   hypertext; therefore, it must allow me to create single source doc
   to some measure;
*  Must provide the conversion utilities required to port the files
   from DOS to Unix or vice versa.  Other convertors would be nice:
   SGML, HTML, Mac...
*  Must expertly handle multi-document features:  headers, footers,
   indexes, table of contents, footnotes, cross-references, etc.
*  Must allow such multi-documents to be easily maintained.

My question, can you please tell me why, apart from the obvious, I
would choose to use Word over FrameMaker, or vice versa.

Regards,
Denise
denise -at- tecsys -dot- com