Re: Engineering Textbook: Word MasterDocs vs FrameMaker vs ... ???

[Chris Morton <salt -dot- morton -at- gmail -dot- com>]

My choice would be to write the text in Word, then dump that into InDesign
for layout/formatting.indexing.

Chris Morton

<https://www.the-efa.org/memberinfo/chris-morton-10670/>
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On Wed, Oct 20, 2021 at 8:17 AM Nina Rogers <janina -dot- rogers -at- gmail -dot- com> wrote:

> Good morning, Techwhirlers,
>
> My company has developed an engineering textbook, and Yours Truly is to do
> all of the editing and formatting. It's a great opportunity for me, but
> I've never been on a project like this.
>
> There are four authors who have been using Word MasterDocs for the book,
> and they just sent me the files yesterday. I have not used Word MasterDocs
> since, oh, 1998 or so. Back then, even though I was an "expert," I still
> found it very clunky and unpredictable, particularly in the areas of
> cross-references and indexing.
>
> I would think that Word has improved its capacity to handle large documents
> (this doc will be about 400 pages), but I don't know. I use Word all the
> time, but not for things like this. I am wondering if it would be better to
> put the book into FrameMaker--partly because I know FrameMaker is made for
> this kind of document, and partly because I use FrameMaker all the time for
> technical manuals.
>
> I realize these are both older tools and there are probably many newer
> tools available. I'd be interested in knowing what's out there and may
> be better for this project, but at the same time I'd like to stick with
> what I know/what software the company already has.
>
> Any input/advice all of you have would be appreciated. Thanks!
>
> Nina Rogers
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