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David,
Are you clairvoyant? Or have you worked for this company/department
previously? That's creepy how dead on you are.
I frequently joke that my manager is stuck in the Gutenberg age. She
came from a newspaper background and our department was originally set
up just as you describe, with drafters creating line drawings by hand
and shooting a negative. Even MSWord was not a viable tool. In fact I
still have old versions of installation instruction text composed on an
electric typewriter and marked up for editing.
I recently ran a test in MS Word trying to match the output of our
Interleaf/Quicksilver software in a document using digital photographs.
Out of a sampling of 10 people, only two could definitively say that one
version was from Quicksilver. In fact two others preferred the Word
version!
Dick, good points, probably made more valid in larger labor pools.
However, I live in northern MN where our pool is quite small. None of
our composition people have been formally trained and finding capable
writers in this region is as hard as finding Quicksilver specialists.
Frankly, my knowledge of the window and construction industry is harder
to impart onto someone with available Quicksilver knowledge versus me
(and the other two writers) becoming proficient in the publishing
software(at least at present levels. Over time, I have become a SME.
Product knowledge, building contacts and trust, in this industry take a
great deal of time.
For you Frame proponents, I have also made semi-frequent "nudgings" that
we should switch to Frame.
-----Original Message-----
From: David Neeley [mailto:dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 28, 2004 3:45 PM
To: Eric Bolton
Cc: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: layout duties
Eric,
At a minimum, I would think the "layout people" should be in the same
department.
It sounds as if your present setup is only an outgrowth of the times
when all layouts had to be hand done on a board for photographing and
creating printing negatives....or, perhaps, it is an outgrowth of a
prior Interleaf installation. Often, Interleaf was so expensive that
people looked to keep the number of licenses to a minimum.
As it is, it seems horribly wasteful on all sides. The turnaround
times must be incredibly long, and every time you "hand it off to
layout" you introduce more opportunities for errors to creep in.
Today, there are many routes to getting multiple output--most of which
would give your organization significant savings in time and money
once implemented. As a minimum, I would think that your writers could
do the bulk of the formatting and layout stuff--with one person to do
templates and the like.
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