Re: Summary: Using Word's Hidden Text as a conditional....

[Kathryn Marshall <kmarsh -at- EARTHLINK -dot- NET>]

Huber, Mike wrote:
>
> I'm in the process of evaluating Framemaker as a replacement for Word. I'm
> no big fan of Word, but, unfortunately, there's a lot of merit to what Roy
> says.
>
> In particular, compatibility with the rest of the company and moving the
> legacy documents are serious concerns.
> I've tried moving documents back and forth between Word and Framemaker.
> It's a reasonably simple process compared to some other ports I've tried
> (Interleaf to anything, for example... shudder...) but the layout doesn't
> quite match. I haven't run into any big problems, but enough little ones to
> realize we can't single-source between Word and Framemaker.
>
> In my work, I frequently get information from developers in the form of
> Word documents. Often, they need Word documents back. And moving away from

I suppose it depends on your company and what you're willing to deal
with. I work for a small software company. Everyone uses Word (grrr...),
but I asked them to buy FrameMaker for me (only tech writer). It's $600
bucks -- pretty much worth it, I think. The rest of the company uses
Word, but so far I have not had a problem, mainly because all I do is
write the manuals. Since we use RoboHELP, I do have to use Word to
create the online help, but it only adds one extra, painless step to the
process.

All of the programmers here write their specs in Word. So I have to use
Word to read them. I guess I have my own system going here. Memos and
letters or anything that needs to be accessible by everyone, I write in
Word. Everything else is FrameMaker. Again, this is much easier for me
because the company is small and I'm the only writer.

-Kathy

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