I've gotten some wonderful responses both on the list and privately. I'd begun to think that, since a lot of my clients rely on freelancers who come and go, structured FrameMaker might be the way to ensure consistency across documents.
Then it occurred to me, how hard is it to get writers on board with structured documentation? If you hire a new person and they don't know structured FrameMaker, how much coaching do you have to do to get them started? And . . . does it really make the usual craziness about autonumbering and variables in headers, footers, TOCs, LOTs, LOFs, and Indexes . . GO AWAY? (I mean, in this situation: new contractor comes on board, gets new template, at some point copies text from an older doc with conflicting paragraph tags; variables and cross-references break; frustration and hair-tearing ensue.) The elimination of that struggle would be worth a lot. Thanks one and all.
