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Leo Hill wondered: Our company employs six full time TechWriters here
in the US. We have one Technical Author in the UK. Our UK guy is
mostly an independent entity. He has been using Adobe Creative Suite
(CS2) for some time. The document style that he has been producing has
caught the eye of our US marketing folks and they would like us to
adopt his overall "look". Here in the US we are using Framemaker and
CorelDraw as our primary creative software... We've just been through a
round of computer upgrades and our manager has asked if we want to
budget for any software upgrades in 2007? The tentative answer is that
we all would like to migrate our work to CS2.>>
Any time you want to change software when the current software is
basically working well, the first question to ask is the following
two-parter: "What problems are we experiencing that we can't solve with
the current software? Are we _sure_ we can't solve those problems with
the current software?" More often than not, the answer is "actually, we
don't have any major problems, and the problems we do have can be
solved easily enough if we'd only ask techwr-l." <g> That's doubly true
if it's purely a look and feel issue. Frame doesn't emphasize elegant
design, but it's nonetheless a powerful design tool.
The second question you have to ask is equally important: "What things
are going to break badly if we move to the new software?" I'm a big fan
of Adobe's products, but you want to take a long, hard look at whether
InDesign can match Frame in a feature by feature comparison based on
the features you actually use to do the hard work in Frame and Corel. I
haven't heard anything good or bad about InDesign's long-document
skills, but at least as of CS1, it didn't seem to compare favorably
with Frame for long-document features. Note that this is emphatically
not a well-supported opinion: I simply haven't performed a rigorous
comparison, and base this solely on reading the manual cover to cover.
InDesign may indeed be a Frame killer.
You'll also have to carefully examine how well InDesign will integrate
with your current workflow. For example, if you use tools like WebWorks
and RoboWhatever to generate help files and other single-sourced
goodies, you may have significant problems. If you use a third-party
indexing tool to create indexes, compare it with InDesign's indexing
tool. If you publish internationally, confirm that you can continue to
localize/internationalize equally well.
In short, perform a very careful needs assessment: what are your
absolute requirements versus "just nice" features, and how well does
each tool meet those requirements. Some of those requirements will be
deal-killers.
<<And before anyone says to stick with Frame - we writers (US) have all
agreed that we want to move away from that platform so we can more
easily reproduce the look that the UK guy is doing.>>
That's really a poor reason to make the change. Techwhirlers tend to
obsess over tools when what's really important is the content and how
effectively you present it. The August 2005 issue of _Technical
Communication_ offers some interesting insights into how we
techwhirlers become marginalized and devalued when we emphasize tools
over how those tools support the company's business goals. Best of all,
the articles are real-world, not purely theoretical. Well worth reading
imho.
I'd be very careful to confirm that you can't easily recreate the
InDesign layouts in Frame; I'm no Frame expert, but I recall a
blow-by-blow comparison of Frame with all the main competitors of the
day about 5 years back (PageMaker, Ventura, Quark) by one of the big
names in desktop publishing (Olav Martin Kvern?). The conclusion? The
software is now powerful enough that you can do pretty much anything
you want with any of the biggies. I imagine that's even more so now.
Without denigrating the importance of esthetics and good design, let me
remind you that we must make great efforts to ensure that management
doesn't start seeing us as font fondlers.
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