Hi Deirdre I've used Frame since 1992 for a variety of different products, including tons of white papers, manuals, training guides, technical marketing materials, policies, procedures, reports, spec sheets and the like. During the past few years, I've focused on using unstructured Frame for single sourced projects with multiple outputs such as print documentation, online help, print-friendly PDFs, online-friendly PDFs, etc. All the documents I've created have relied heavily on numbering, cross-referencing, consistency in terminology, have short creation deadlines and even shorter editing deadlines.
For one document, a user guide of over 6500 pages, we were able to turn on a dime when we had over 2500 pages completed...we strictly enforced the use of character and paragragh tags, variables and cross references. When the client's legal time wanted the product name to always have a trademark, it was changed within minutes of the request. And when a manager decided we absolutely *must* use different formatting for the keys pressed, it was completed in minutes and all remaining content was matched to the new standards with no muss, no fuss. I can't say I would use for products that required fine layout techniques and especially not for documents with heavy footnoting requirements. It positively sucks for those! My most recent project is using Frame to single source a series of policies and procedures for over 18 plants. The materials are at least 50-60% reusable and we're using standard, unstructured Frame features to handle the changes that are made on a plant by plant basis. Although the end users protested at first, they were won over when they found out about the neat new things they could get (everything from not being responsible for writing and maintaining the content to hotlinked references to the relevant regulatory local, state, and federal codes! Hope this helps Jerilynne Knight Simply Written, Inc.
