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Subject:Moving from Word to Frame From:"M. Dannenberg" <midannen -at- SI -dot- BOSCH -dot- DE> Date:Thu, 5 Jun 1997 10:22:10 +0200
Over the past couple of months I've been introducing Frame within my
company, while at the same time trying to come up with some kind of
documentation methodology and handling several large writing projects -
lone techwriter syndrome, that's right.
Frame is too expensive to buy a license for everybody, so the occasional
writers will keep using Word, only people who write a lot of
documentation now have Frame. While this gives us the ususal
file-conversion pain in the behind, everybody who's ever written
anything remotely complex loves Frame and would never want to go back to
Word.
To ease the file exchange problem, I've created templates in both Word
and Frame that use the same style names, and instructed people to keep
separate copies of all illustrations and screenshots. That way any
drafts people write can quickly be converted and incorporated in Frame
documents. On the whole it works quite well and I'd say that Frame
definitely saves a lot more blood, sweat and tears that it causes.
Legacy documentation is always a problem, of course. In our case all the
old stuff is such a mess that it would have had to be cleaned up anyway,
before publication, so doing the clean-up and the conversion at the same
time makes sense. We're going to outsource most of that work, so it
should be reasonably painless.
Mike
--
Mike Dannenberg
ETAS GmbH & Co.KG
midannen -at- si -dot- bosch -dot- de
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