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David Blyth claims...
>
> Interleaf is the hands-down winner here, no questions asked. Frame's
> problem is that index and cross reference markers:
>
> o Are indistinquishable from eachother
>
> o Show up as 1 marker even if you have 10 in a row.
>
> (Yes, I know you can put more than one index reference
> in a marker. But if you do, you can't determine how many
> index references you've made at that location. This loses
> useful information.)
>
> However, Frame's TOC and indexing mechanisms are _much_ better
> than MS Word. For one thing, you can actually index a large doc.
Unless Interleaf has had a major upgrade in the last year, I will
take Frame's indexing any day. Interleaf wrecks havoc with hyphens
or any other special character in the index. Also, last time I worked
on it, there was no way to go from the Index directly to the marker
(a wonderful little feature of Frame's hypertext). Trying to correct
an Interleaf index was shear hell. In fact, I worked on indexing
a 500-page manual for 4 months on Interleaf. We ended up trashing
the whole thing and doing it by hand. Now that is sad.
And don't even try to do anything special with Interleaf in the
way of file transfer. After working for 2 months trying to port
Interleaf into a Fax-Back system, we finally scanned the documents
in by hand.
Last thing I heard, the big company I was working for had decided
it was cheaper to trash $75,000 worth of Interleaf and start buying
Frame.
IMHO, Interleaf is powerful DTP program and I really miss some of
the things it did well. However, it has so many little quirks and
buggy things that I would never choose to buy it. Besides, last
time I checked, Frame was 90% as good and 10% the price.
Melonie Holliman
The Tech Writer
ABM Data Systems, Inc.
Austin, Texas
(mrh -at- abmdata -dot- com)
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