Hi Deirdre: No one's mentioned this yet, so I'll add for all the single-sourcing people out there that FrameMaker is wonderful for writing things once and using it many times. Whether you're using conditional text and variables so that some stuff only shows up in certain flavours of manuals, or text insets so that a piece of text can be used by different manuals, or generating HTML and PDF from the same FrameMaker document, it's all called single-sourcing and it saves a lot of time and effort.
Then there's the whole structured and XML side of FrameMaker, which can also be a huge timesaver. In a nutshell, it automates a lot of the tedious formatting tasks for you. Round-tripping to XML also means that people who don't have FrameMaker can still work on the documents. Also, you can develop scripts to produce the XML that is subsequently opened in FrameMaker where the formatting is automatically applied. All this intro is to say that I'm using FrameMaker on software manuals, but some of the contents are generated from programming code as XML files, and some of the Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) are working in XML. I'm producing HTML for Eclipse help and PDFs. We have eight product lines, so I'm re-using a lot of the material for two or more products, and I can manage all this as a lone writer working 3/4 time because of FrameMaker and its add-ons. Fei Min "Deirdre Reagan" <deirdre.reagan at gmail.com> Sent by: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com 05/07/2008 12:06 PM To "Frame Users" <framers at lists.frameusers.com> cc Subject Framemaker Uses Just out of curiosity, what kinds of documents are people producing in Framemaker? Our department produces aeronautial documents, such as Component Maintenance Manuals, Aircraft Maintenance Manuals, Wiring Diagram Manuals, and Illustrated Parts Catalogs. Do people produce books and magazines with Framemaker? Is Stephen King writing his next masterpiece on Framemaker? Does Anna Wintour use Framemaker to kick the next issue of Vogue to the curb? Are there websites that have been created in a Framemaker environment? I'm curious to know how widely used this product is and for what applications. Thanks! Deirdre _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to Framers as FeiMin_Lorente at amis.com. Send list messages to framers at lists.frameusers.com. To unsubscribe send a blank email to framers-unsubscribe at lists.frameusers.com or visit http://lists.frameusers.com/mailman/options/framers/feimin_lorente%40amis.com Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.
