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Re: Revisiting Frame vs. Word in light of new capabilities

Subject: Re: Revisiting Frame vs. Word in light of new capabilities
From: quills -at- airmail -dot- net
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 2005 22:26:44 -0600



the question to ask is how much time do they want to add to maintain the documents?

With Word, it will increase by about one third to one half, while you manually do what FrameMaker does systemically. Word requires that you overcome its broken features, missing features, or features that don't quite make the grade with your own programming. How good are you with Visual Basic?

This is the fallacy of comparing Word with FrameMaker. FrameMaker is designed to produce long and complex documents. It includes the features to do this in varying degrees.

Word on the other hand is a word processor with add on features. If you want to do the same things as you do with FrameMaker then you have to do the programming that Microsoft left out.

Basically it is like moving 10 tons of material from point A to point B. What do you want to do it with? An 18 wheel tractor trailer rig, or an Isuzu pickup truck?

You can do it with either on. The tool that was designed to do it is usually the most cost-effective.

1. Word is popular. It means we can hire any
substitute if current one (tech writer/translator to
Japanese) is resigned or terminated.

Word is popular. It is a generalist tool. It is designed to do short documents, with not a great deal of complexity.


2. Software is not expensive.

If you need asprin you use asprin. If you need a more powerful pain-killer, the cost is not the driving factor.


3. We do not worry about localization cost since ever
country uses Word and we can find some one to do the
work easy.

Use a translation company. They provide their own software.

4. Functionalities are very much same today.

In Word? Yes, they are inadequate for the type of processing that you are doing. Word is not adequate for the timeframe or capability that you have described. Word has not changed its functionality in many great ways, other than add HTML export, and XML export.


Guess what? XML is text. Anything will write XML. I trust Adobe not to paint me into a corner by requiring a proprietary schema for XML it produces, as does Word.


5. Word will be more powerful than FrameMaker in near
future. [Wow! Hurry up and buy the stock! Just
kidding]

If the software doesn't have the features you need now, do not count on it in the future. Microsoft will not necessarily deliver on vaporware.



6. We have to spend a lot of time and money to convert
to Japanese for if we have to use FrameMaker.

Use a translation company.

I worked for a company that wanted to convert a set of three manuals into South American Spanish, French, and German. We recommended that the company use a translation company.

No, the senior management didn't like the $300,000 price tag for a six month effort. Instead, they enlisted a vendor of our product in each of these countries/areas, to do the translation for a total of a third of the price.

Two years latter the last manual was completed. They were three full versions out of date, and none of them ever was updated.

Result... $100,000 poured down a rat hole. No one ever used the manuals.

Use the right tool for the job. Not a cheap imitation.

As for the comparisions you found. They are applicable. Just remember the only real updating to features for Word has been HTML and XML. So what increase in ability have you with Word 2000 or Word 2003? None.

It is still just as inadequate for the specified job as before.

Word is less capable of autonumbering, without more effort on the part of the user. Word is harder to use for cross referencing, hyperlinking, indexing, etc.

It is not as easy to use to create tables.

It is fine to write letters.

It is less capable when importing text, doing conditional passages, TOC, Indexing multiple files. It does not import graphics as easily as FrameMaker, and does not allow easy scaling of graphics.

Indeed, there are some graphics you can import into Word that won't display. They will print, but you can't see the suckers on the screen

Scott



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