RE: Guide to Visio for FrameMaker users?

Subject: RE: Guide to Visio for FrameMaker users?
From: "Guy K. Haas" <guy -at- hiskeyboard -dot- com>
To: "Combs, Richard" <richard -dot- combs -at- Polycom -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:40:33 -0700

Thanks, guys, but here's my situation:

We have books in FrameMaker and are porting them across to DITA, to be
maintained in XMetaL. The graphics for our DITA world need to be rendered
in Visio.

I'm recreating existing art -- art created in FrameMaker.

I'm not trying to build my skill set in the use of Visio, so much as I'm
trying to simply translate my skills in FrameMaker graphics well enough to
casually use Visio for a more-or-less one-time project.

First headache:
The tools in FrameMaker for processing grahics are all on one menu
vs
the tools of Visio are scatt..... er... distributed among several menus

So, once I trudge through the "help" in Visio and manage to locate the
info about how to draw a simple line (the "help" tells me about using
tools I can't FIND because they are on toolbars that defaulted to not be
in the view) I use the line tool to draw a line.

Then, I hunt around to see how to activate/deactivate snap and gravity.

Then, I hunt around to see how to STOP the cursor from being the
line-drawing tool and go back to just a selector tool (the big white
arrow cursor is on a different toolbar than the line-drawing tool is.

Then, I hunt around some more to see how to select a line and move it a
few pixels left and up.

So, what I need is a translation facility that says "if you know how to
use THIS in FrameMaker graphics, HERE's how you do it in Visio".

As for "smart objects", I want my connector lines to latch onto the edges
of shapes at points I choose, not the center of each edge.

And I was gobsmacked the first time I opened Visio and consulted the File
menu -- because it showed me a list of "recently used" vsd files I had
never used in Visio. After a few minutes of contemplation, I realized
that they were vsd files that were mentioned in MSWord documents that I
had opened weeks earlier in MSWord. Because Visio is part of the MSOffice
suite, it "helpfully" knows about them. I'm reminded of "helpful"
Clippy....

--Thanks,
Guy K. Haas
Software Exegete in Silicon Valley

On Thu, October 15, 2009 7:15 am, Combs, Richard wrote:
> Robert Lauriston wrote:
>
>> If you need to tweak an element, Visio's probably the wrong tool. The
>> "smart" objects are supposed to tweak themselves (and often do,
>> sometimes in ways you might not want).
>
> This can't be emphasized enough. Guy, if you're going to use Visio
> without getting all bent out of shape (so to speak ;-)), you need to
> understand how it's fundamentally different from a set of drawing tools
> and come to terms with those differences. It's a really excellent,
> powerful tool. But if you fight it, you'll get very frustrated.

...

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Free Software Documentation Project Web Cast: Covers developing Table of
Contents, Context IDs, and Index, as well as Doc-To-Help
2009 tips, tricks, and best practices.
http://www.doctohelp.com/SuperPages/Webcasts/

Help & Manual 5: The complete help authoring tool for individual
authors and teams. Professional power, intuitive interface. Write
once, publish to 8 formats. Multi-user authoring and version control! http://www.helpandmanual.com/

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Follow-Ups:

References:
Guide to Visio for FrameMaker users?: From: Guy K. Haas
Re: Guide to Visio for FrameMaker users?: From: Robert Lauriston
RE: Guide to Visio for FrameMaker users?: From: Combs, Richard

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