Re: Document size

[Dina Marroquin <DMarroquin -at- FRXSOFT -dot- COM>]

Marcia, I agree with Jane: there are no "rules" of thumb.

I recall (painfully) that at my last job we had a huge manual in
PageMaker on the Mac, approximately 400 pages, that needed to be
continually updated. I think the book was composed of 50+ files. It was
very difficult to manage this project, but it can be done. It's just not
much fun. All other projects that I worked on were done in Microsoft
Word for Windows (average book size: 200 pages with standard screen
shots and no complex formatting).

Then, someone in upper management decided that Microsoft Word for
Windows was going to become the company standard as was personal
computers. What a nightmare it was to convert those PM files to Word! I
had to first upgrade PageMaker so I could port the files over to a PC,
save all files in rich text, and then import them into Word. Yikes. I
lost a lot of formatting and spent a lot of time making it look like the
old manual (which if I might add, was poorly designed) because that's
what Sales wanted. Behind the scenes, I was rallying for FrameMaker but
I was ignored until I started screaming. I finally was heard, but it
took three years. (Ironically, by the time it came in and I started
learning it, I got fed up and went on to a job that has been much
better. BTW: They hired me even though I only had minimal exposure to
RoboHelp and Frame because they were confident in my writing skills and
my ability to come up to speed with the tools fairly quickly. Lucky me.)


Bottom line: You can make your tools work for you most of the time, but
you might not always be happy about it.

Dina Marroquin
Technical Writer
FRx Software Corporation
dmarroquin -at- frxsoft -dot- com

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