RE: That FrameMaker / Word thang...

["Fred Ridder" <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

As a FrameMaker user and advocate, I feel strange coming to Word's 
defense...

In reality, Word's IF field code is more powerful than FrameMaker's 
conditional
text implementation because it supports Boolean operators.

In Frame, the show/hide logic is strictly OR, and show takes precedence over
hide.  If *any* condition tag applied to a text item is set to show, it 
doesn't
matter that every other condition applied to is is set to hide; the text 
shows.
In practice, this means that you wind up having to define a larger number of
conditions to cover the logical combinations of orthogonal conditions.
Four products supported on three operating systems means 12 conditions are
required to allow you to have complete control of the show/hide rules.
Boolean operators in show/hide rules is one of the most frequently asked-for
features in FrameMaker.

In Word, you can use AND and OR operators or nested IF fileds when building
the IF feilds to conditionalize text, and this gives much more control over 
the
rules that you can construct. On the other hand, the need to specify every
item of conditional content inside these complex field codes is realy 
cumbersome.

My opinions only; I don;t speak for Intel.
Fred Ridder
Intel
Parsippany, NJ