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Re: What Program Do You Use For Software Documentation? + Wiki Question
Subject:Re: What Program Do You Use For Software Documentation? + Wiki Question From:Gary Schnabl <gSchnabl -at- LivernoisYards -dot- com> Date:Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:27:57 -0400
Janet Swisher wrote:
> Let me also second Kevin's endorsement for OpenOffice.org. Not only is
> it free, but it is much less prone to corrupting documents than Word.
> Its "master document" feature (for combining multiple files into a
> single large document) actually works, in contrast to Word, whose
> master document feature is just broken and should be avoided.
>
OpenOffice (OOo) is great for most authoring/editing functions. However,
OOo 's master documents, however, don't easily support x-refs from one
external subdocument to another. For that, FrameMaker is a decent choice.
Three months ago, a British author wanted his two-volume Cisco CCNA
training book combined into a single book. The first volume was some 300
A4 pages, while the second volume was around 200 pages. The first
edition's first volume was initially on a highly bloated DOC file (over
93 MB). I first converted it to OOo so that I could create a quick PDF.
However, I initially decided (unwisely) to use Word 2007 to generate a
long single DOC document before sending off a PDF (using Acrobat 8
Professional) to the printer.
The first volume then steadily came down in size until it stabilized to
a file size around 35-40 MB. When the second volume was appended to the
first, Word started to crash occasionally, and sometimes, breaking a
bit. So, I then did what I should have from the beginning--used a
conventional (unstructured) FrameMaker master document (a FM book file)
and broke the large DOC file into some three dozen subdocuments.
FrameMaker did the job well, without any problems whatsoever.
In addition, Structured FrameMaker does XML rather easily due to its
WYSIWYG nature--much easier than both OOo or Word 2007. I recently
downloaded the most current (non-normative) DocBook 5 DTD file
<http://docbook.org/schemas/5x> from DocBook.org for my older FM 7.0
installation and afterwards generated a master FrameMaker EDD file for
general formatting purposes. Smaller, customized versions of that large
EDD file could then be tailor-made for various formatting styles
(depending upon one's actual formatting needs).
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