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Subject:Re: My take on Word vs. FrameMaker From:"Tony G. Rocco" <trocco -at- NAVIS -dot- COM> Date:Thu, 5 Dec 1996 11:10:07 -0800
Ditto, Mitch. Nice exposition.
One small exception to what you said about FrameMaker: you don't have to be
working with HUGE documents to benefit from using it. Just the normal
book-length documents many technical writers produce (100+ pages) are
certainly long enough to warrant the use of FrameMaker over Word.
Of course, FrameMaker has many faults, but its virtue is that it was
created to do what tech writers typically do: design and produce books.
Word and other apps like WordPerfect were meant more as multi-purpose,
mass-market word processing apps not specifically designed with book
building in mind. PageMaker and QuarkXpress were meant for shorter
magazine/newspaper layouts and consequently are awkward to use with longer
documents, as I can well attest.
FrameMaker should indeed be the tool of choice for tech writers,
shortcomings and all, IMHO.
