Interleaf Dilemma

["Johnson, Mike (MED, OEC)" <Mike -dot- Johnson -at- amermsx -dot- med -dot- ge -dot- com>]

Greetings from Sunny Utah!

In the near future our tech pubs group is going to be producing a large
hardware documentation set that will consist of several new volumes
mingled with boatloads of existing volumes produced in Interleaf by
another tech pubs group in France.  The existing Interleaf volumes will
require considerable revision.  We are on a tight deadline, and are
trying to decide how to proceed with this.  Our current tools arsenal
consists of Word and PageMaker 6.5.  Please don't laugh!  This is
serious!

We see three alternatives:

1.	Get several copies of Interleaf and do everything in Interleaf.
We have one writer who had some positive experience with Interleaf
several years ago, and the rest of us will have to learn it from
scratch.  As we understand it, Interleaf costs $1,000 a year per seat.
You can't buy Interleaf.  You have to subscribe to it.

2.	Get FILTRIX or a similar filter program that will translate the
Interleaf to FrameMaker, and use FrameMaker to do the new work.  Again,
only one of our writers has used FrameMaker, and we'll all need
training.

3.	Get FILTRIX or a similar filter program that will translate the
Interleaf to Word, and use Word!  We've all used Word before, but never
for anything this large.  We all feel nervous about doing big books with
it.

We would certainly appreciate hearing from anybody who has been in a
similar spot.  I will summarize responses for the list.

Thanks!

Mike Johnson
GE OEC Medical Systems