SUMMARY: Framemaker vs. Quark

["Sierra Godfrey" <kittenbreath -at- hotbot -dot- com>]

A little late, but here it is:

I'm currently working on redoing a book for my company. I chose to use FrameMaker for the doc. I contacted the marketing dept. to talk about cover art. They in turn spoke to the company who does their graphic design. This guy, who's going to work on the cover art, informed them that I should be using Quark to produce the doc because it was an industry standard and that most service bureaus didn't work with Frame. Have any of you had to deal with something similar? I balked, of course. This guy really didn't know
what he was talking about. Sure, if you are going to produce brochures and slicks you use Quark. But, in my case, I needed to use Frame because it provided me a way to import PDFs easily into the pages, use an existing
template, and generate lists with minimal effort. 

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Both products you have available are very good for their intended use. Frame is the choice when it comes to robust structured documents where
contents is the primary goal. Quark is the choice for typographically demanding 4-color documents where appearance is the primary goal.

So, it depends on the documents you produce. One thing which you might keep in mind is that Quark has lots of XTensions which add functionality. Some of them are freeware, others are very expensive. Many of them bring in some
kind of functionality which Frame has in its base product.

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Probably the strongest point to stay with Frame is the question of tables. The standard Quark table functionality is about the same as wordprocessors had 15 years ago. If your documents have tables, you can expect a
considerable loss of productivity with Quark.

When we are with productivity. Text editing in Frame is not very highly sophisticated, but Quark's is even less. So, you can expect less
productivity here as well.

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> Quark is not designed for book production. The base product cannot generate
> a TOC or an index. You cannot have multiple files grouped into a single
> book.

Unfortunately this information is outdated. QXP 4.x does all of this. The
TOC generation is excellent and the book generation from separate files
works very well. Unfortunately, Indexing is poor.

So, while I agree QXP is not an appropriate tool to use, it is just not for these reasons. Personally, I feel that a Quark user should not fear moving from 3.3x to 4.x. Sure, 4 had some issues when first released but that was over 2 years ago.

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Quark is a wonderful layout/design program with many valuable features. I love it and wish I could use it for my current job. The reason I can't? I deliberately chose not to because:

Quark is not designed for book production. The base product cannot generate a TOC or an index. You cannot have multiple files grouped into a single book.

Quark proponents will tell you that there are third-party XTensions that will let you create TOCs and indexes. Hah. I used the indexing one (I can't remember its name) and there was still a ton of manual labor involved.

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Your boss needs to ask why marketing thinks Quark is the right tool for the job you need to do, and then understand the difference between the kinds of documents you produce and the ones that marketing produces. If I were in marketing I'd want Quark too, but I'm also not arrogant enough to tell another writer producing different kinds of documents what tool they
"should" be using.

Here are some words from someone on the Frame list who's familiar with both
products and was addressing a conversion issue (from Quark to Frame) for me.
She has some interesting points about things that Frame can't deal with that
Quark can. It may help you:

"certain features that are easy to create in Quark are extremely
"un-Frame-like". We have struggled quite a lot here with adapting
Quark-based designs for FrameMaker books. The fundamental paradigm conflict
is that Quark is based on the concept of individual pages, while Frame is
more about the flow of the data stream.

"Some guidelines:

        - No vertical rules
        - No rounded rectangles
        - Anything designed in a box should become a table in FrameMaker
        - Watch out for special tracking, kerning, or line spacing

"When you start feeling frustrated by difficulty recreating arty effects
from Quark, just remember that most Quark users are still typing out their
Tables of Contents manually."

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We use Quark here. It's a great tool for short, graphic-intensive documents.
Unfortunately, that's not what we produce. :-P

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I think this last one says it all.  Thanks everyone!
-Sierra



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