Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on October 06, 2004 06:11 AM
I've drifted between word and framemaker for the past few years. When it was time to decide on a tool for creating my Ph. D. thesis in, I was initially reluctant to open up framemaker again (seriously obsolete by then). Word was not an option given its tendency to corrupt much smaller documents than my thesis. So I looked at open office. It has a lot going for it (xml format, plenty of nice features). However, its cross references functionality is non existent. There's a feature called cross reference but its really a bookmark feature. A very limited form of bookmarks. You can't even refer numbers of numbered paragraphs unless they are part of the outline (and even then it is very limited). And you have to manually bookmark anything you want to refer to. Framemaker (and word by the way) allow you to refer pretty much anything numbered in pretty much any way you want. That's kind of a crucial feature for large documents (legal documents, manuals, ph. d. thesises, etc.). I've got numbered tables, figures, sections, references, etc. that I want to refer to and they are not all part of the outline. I've pointed this out years ago in issuezilla and these issues are still not understood very well in the openoffice team (witness the endless, pointless discussions and lack of development activity). It's not being fixed for 2.0 as far as I know and the reason is that they don't understand or care about powerusers. It's their good right of course but I find it a bit disappointing.
Eventually I did open up framemaker and it performed as reliable as you might expect. Feature by feature, framemaker was designed from the ground up to be used by professionals to create large, structured content. Openoffice is more tailored to casual usage. Things a power user would look for are seriously underpowered in open office whereas framemaker is very unforgiving to casual usage. It shows in things like cross references and is just not good enough for someone used to what framemaker can do. Sure the framemaker ui is seriously out of date, it's bloated, quirky but it is also a reliable powertool.
If only adobe would bother to put some time in it to modernize it. For some time I had good hopes that openoffice would fill the now vacant position of tool of choice for highly structured document editing. However, I don't see any evidence of people at openoffice interested in doing so. They seem to be pretty content at creating a poor mans word.
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Framemaker is still better for complex docs
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on October 06, 2004 06:11 AMEventually I did open up framemaker and it performed as reliable as you might expect. Feature by feature, framemaker was designed from the ground up to be used by professionals to create large, structured content. Openoffice is more tailored to casual usage. Things a power user would look for are seriously underpowered in open office whereas framemaker is very unforgiving to casual usage. It shows in things like cross references and is just not good enough for someone used to what framemaker can do. Sure the framemaker ui is seriously out of date, it's bloated, quirky but it is also a reliable powertool.
If only adobe would bother to put some time in it to modernize it. For some time I had good hopes that openoffice would fill the now vacant position of tool of choice for highly structured document editing. However, I don't see any evidence of people at openoffice interested in doing so. They seem to be pretty content at creating a poor mans word.
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