RE: Re. Tools: Word/Weird?

["Brierley, Sean" <Sean -at- Quodata -dot- Com>]

Ahhh, VolksWriter. That brings back memories, 256k, dual 720k floppy drives,
no math coprocessor, yum ;?). At the same time, I was using MacWrite, which
was much more sophisticated <vbg>. And then, the best of all word processing
software to come out of the middle ages, WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS! The creme
de la creme. Sweet.

So much software under the bridge to leave us with how many choices?

MS Word and Adobe FrameMaker are indeed apples and oranges. I like both, for
different tasks. Each could benefit from features the other has, no doubt
about it. I'm not going to beat up either, that's been done ad nauseam.
Instead, with the (double-underlined) preface that *you* really need to have
a well-sorted argument to switch from one to another at the corporate level,
briefly, here's what I think:

MS Word 97: I love the GUI (except for the dancing paper clip crap). It's
intuitive. I enjoy the spell checker. I like the export and import filters.
Word viruses are a non-issue. The macro language itself, VBA, is excellent
and without equal. Third party support and Word's inclusion in the Office
suite are wonderful.

FrameMaker 5.5.6: I love the stability and productivity. IMHO, no other
software is as robust for long technical documents, with the book and
chapter file relationship being a strong asset. The workflow FrameMaker
requires is particularly helpful, as are its use of paragraph styles and
character styles. Conditional text is a boon and the equation editor and
drawing tools are well integrated, although everyone else has or is catching
up in this area. PDF filters work very well and HTML filters are solid, too:
I look forward to reviewing the WebWorks SE addition for XML and HTML in
FrameMaker 6. Numbering, indexing, and reference tables are all robust and
powerful.

All the best,

Sean
sean -at- quodata -dot- com