What this co-worker is creating are unmaintainable documents. When they need to be edited for the next version, it's going to take someone hours and hours to change out one graphic that appears in 8 places. Days to edit the copied text. The cost of making one small change to these documents can be measured in hundreds of dollars. 10 minutes of changes become 3 days of changes.
I don't know if you have supervisory status in this situation, but a process and Best Practices must be put in place. When running my own company and when docs manager, I put these in place, trained the writers in them. After that, anyone who created unmaintainable documents was fired. By me. Happily! sharon Sharon Burton Content Strategy Consultant 951-369-8590 New book "8 Steps to Amazing Webinars" available on Amazon and BN.com www.sharonburton.com IM: sharonvburton at yahoo.com Twitter: sharonburton http://www.linkedin.com/in/sharonvburton -----Original Message----- From: framers-boun...@lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Combs, Richard Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 6:56 AM To: Ken Poshedly; FrameMaker Users List Subject: RE: best use of graphics in FM Ken Poshedly wrote: > Unfortunately, at his prior location, another FM user (more > knowledgeable than my coworker) showed my coworker what I call a "hack" > to get a document done in a fraction of the time that it would > ordinarily take. Specifically, he uses "PrintScreen32" to take screen > shots of existing graphics in the Word or pdf Chinglish books we get > from the home office and then pastes them directly into his FM > document. No muss, no fuss -- and no record of any filename or any > other details about any of the graphics in his documents. > > He also does this with text blocks (sometimes entire pages) from the > Chinglish books and simply pastes those text blocks into his FM > documents. The results are? horrendous because no real editing can be > done (and errors in the original text abound). He simply creates small > FrameMaker text blocks over incorrect words or sentences and types in > the few words or sentences needed to fix something. So his FM > documents are pretty much "pictures" of text with white boxes of > corrected words that give his pages that "ransom-letter look". Reasonable people can disagree about whether the long-term benefits of referenced graphics (updating is practically effortless) are worth a little more time and process up front. I'm firmly in the import by reference camp myself. But no reasonable person -- no competent, sane person -- would paste screen shots of text into a doc! How is this even a time-saver over copying and pasting the text itself? Pick your battles. Agree to disagree on the graphics, but tell your cow-orker that "pictures" of text are an abomination, a maintenance nightmare, a sign of computer illiteracy, and simply can't be tolerated. Richard G. Combs Senior Technical Writer Polycom, Inc. richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom 303-223-5111 ------ rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom 303-903-6372 ------ _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to framers as sharon at anthrobytes.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/sharon%40anthrobytes.com Send administrative questions to listadmin at frameusers.com. Visit http://www.frameusers.com/ for more resources and info.