RE: Opinions on images

[Ed Treijs <etreijs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> What do people think about EMBEDDING images versus LINKING 
> for documentation
> projects. There are some clear-cut reasons for both, but in 
> general if you
> have a choice what do you do?

I embed them all.

This does have the unfortunate effect of resulting in some Frame 7.0 files
which UNIX reports to be as large as 20 MB:

-rwxr-xr-x   1   me    group    20378624 Jan 13 11:39 service_browser.fm*

The reasons I embed the images are:
--we use RCS to back up/archive our docs; RCS handles a single directory
best with the rudimentary RCS scripts we use
--there might be as many as 40 images in a chapter, all used once only
--imported images can occasionally go astray (Murphy would qualify this more
strongly), leading to nice grey boxes in your FrameMaker image frames

I don't find this method to be a problem for updates.  I save my image
captures in numerical order (01.bmp, 02.bmp) in separate directory for each
chapter, and import the graphics into Frame in the same order, basically
right after performing the capture.  I don't quite see how I could update 40
images in an import-by-reference doc without quite an elaborate naming
system for each image, or opening the images to check what they are before
overwriting them with the updated image.

Other people in our group use import-by-reference.  This is done because of
procedures to produce online help from the FrameMaker docs (using ForeHelp
or, now, WebWorks) or because some images are repeated often.  And we did
find and correct some grey boxes when checking over our last release.

Ed (lotsa choices) Treijs

** To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxx **
** with "unsubscribe framers" (no quotes) in the body.   **