Re: DTP tools

[Kat Nagel/MasterWork <katnagel -at- EZNET -dot- NET>]

>Miki Magyar <MDM0857 -at- MCDATA -dot- COM> wrote
>Indeed.  I did a 530-page manual in Word for Macintosh 5.1, including the
>layout.  It was a good-looking manual, too, with plenty of spiffy design
>features.  Later I did a 350-page manual in the same program, though it
>wasn't quite as spiffy.

Word 5.1 was a nice program.  Pretty fast.  Not too much of a memory hog.
Convenient for anything that could be done in a single file.  My program of
choice for anything that contained sorted tables.  I used it for about a
third of
my work until they butchered it to create version 6 (the other 2/3 was in
FrameMaker).

Now I only use Word if I am (a) forced to by a client, (b) billing by the hour,
and (c) working on site so they can actually  -see-  what I'm using.  If I'm
working in my own office, I do the project in Frame.  If the client wants the
electronic files in Word format, I convert just before I hand it off, and use
work-arounds to cobble together something that will print out looking like
the Frame version.

I'm considering developing a two-level price and time estimate scale for
flat-rate contracts:

[$xxxx/y weeks for FrameMaker]
[$XXXX/ Y weeks for Word]
X = at least 2x.  Y = at least 2y.


K@
Kat Nagel, MasterWork Consulting Services
Technical writing / Editing / Document design / Research

"I knew that much of my memory had migrated from protoplasm to silicon,
but I didn't realize how true that was of my social life as well."
___K. Watkins, posted to Wordplay-L (December, 1996)