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I've been using the Creative Suite for a year now and really, really like it - except for
technical documentation.
History: As I started this job, all things have been done in Word and Corel. Neither the most
userfriendly nor the most professional tools in my opinion.
After looking over the kinds of documents and looking into Frame, InDesign and AuthorIT, I voted
for the Creative Suite.
One, with Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat, I have an integrated environment in which I can use
native files and the user interfaces follow similar concepts.
Two, I can use all legacy files with this (AutoCAD, Corel, Word).
Three, I can use nearly every kind of graphics file - which save a lot of stress, but results in
me being the SME for file conversions.
Four, Adobe is constantly working to improve InDesign. The new features for InDesign CS2 sound
good (footnotes, anchored objects, improved library).
Five, a very active scripter community: InDesign supports scripting in JavaScript, AppleScript and
VBA, making the software extremely customisable.
Six, lots of plug-ins available to cure some of the issues mentioned below (better indexing,
references, table/illustration numbering).
Seven, a good book feature.
Eight, InDesign is incredible save: Unlimited undos and constant saving. Even if something
crashes, you don't loose more than one or two steps of your work.
The drawbacks: InDesign misses some important long document features (as of version CS, see
comment of CS2 above). The list features (numbered and unnumbered lists) is very inflexbible,
making nearly useless for technical documentation. Header numbering is not supported.
Table/illustration numbering is not supported. Footnotes are not supported. Indexing is awkward.
I still don't know if CS2 improved on the numbering, but it could of course be scripted.
Since I've been doing mostly marketing material for the last 7 months, the drawbacks have not been
much of an issue and I've been growing very attached to the Suite.
I've been using the versioning software (VersionCue) for some projects and found it helpful -
reverting to previous instances of the document and saving on file naming is cool. But the user
interface is very simple and offers not much. The new VersionCue seems to be improving on that,
allowing parallel versions and featuring previews of the documents, not just the text comments.
HTH,
Jens
<zitiere wer="Elizabeth O'Shea">
>
> And while I'm asking about Adobe products, is anyone buying or upgrading to
> Adobe Creative Suite? What are its benefits for your company? And if you're
> already using version control (for example, we use VSS), are you planning to
> use Creative Suite version control instead for your docs?
>
> Thanks.
>
> elizabeth
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