TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Subject:Re: Frame -> Word From:"M. Dannenberg" <midannen -at- SI -dot- BOSCH -dot- DE> Date:Tue, 30 Sep 1997 14:27:06 +0200
Emma Heftman schrieb:
> Dear all
> My company's decided that all internal documentation should be in Word
> format, despite
> the fact that most of our manuals were written in FrameMaker. The
> decision was made because we
> store our documentation in Lotus Notes and the user's must download
> FrameReader to read
> the documentation, whereas with Word they can just click on a document
> and Lotus knows
> how to open Word.
> I'm using FrameMaker 5.1 on Unix and Windows '95 platforms.
> Any-way, I'm the only tech writer here and I've been given the task of
> researching into the
> issue. So here are my questions:
> 1. Without getting into a major war, what functionalities is Word
> lacking?
> In particular:
>
Without getting into a major war either (har, har), for me this would be
a pack-my-bags-and-get-the-hell-out-of-there issue. Changing from Frame
to Word is about the most pointy-haired decision you can think of, the
pain of converting and the loss of functionality and reliability will
outweigh any possible (or imagined) gains.
If it's really just a matter of making the docs available for viewing,
you might suggest converting to PDF. The Acrobat viewer is a very nice
unproblematic piece of software and it's even free. It should be posible
to set up Notes to open it automatically on encountering a PDF file.
Coming to think of it, this might also be possible with FrameReader.
In a very large organisation it may appear to make sense to convert
documents to Word rather than installing a viewer on 10000 PCs. On the
other hand, I'd much rather personally install Acrobat viewer on 10000
machines than convert a large set of docs to Word.
Mike
--
Mike Dannenberg
ETAS GmbH & Co.KG
midannen -at- si -dot- bosch -dot- de
TECHWR-L (Technical Communication) List Information: To send a message
to 2500+ readers, e-mail to TECHWR-L -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU -dot- Send commands
to LISTSERV -at- LISTSERV -dot- OKSTATE -dot- EDU (e.g. HELP or SIGNOFF TECHWR-L).
Search the archives at http://www.documentation.com/ or search and
browse the archives at http://listserv.okstate.edu/archives/techwr-l.html
