SV: Exco Documentor?

[Sian Petersson <sian.petersson@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thomas Michenek asked about Exco Documentor:

We tried to evaluate Exco Documentor about 10 months ago and we 
have even bought a licence. We produced a few sample documents 
on it but have not really worked with it.

I am not sure, but it seemed that the XML it generated could 
not be read by other XML browsers. There seemed to be exco-
specific lines in it. So we have given up on it for now.

If an entire company uses it, then it might be very successful. 
I really liked the interface. A document is sort of like the 
Bookmarks list in a good PDF file. Click on a heading and it 
opens to show its subheadings. Continue until you get down to 
the actual body text. You always have the whole document 
overview and it is very easy to link and re-use text. Even 100 
page documents worked well. To be specific, it is completely 
non-WYSIWYG and some programming skills are required if you 
want to adjust the layout of the printouts (we never really 
got that far though).

Unfortunately we are very much stuck in the MS Word trap here, 
which is miles away from any XML solution and the introduction 
of Documentor would be too great a change. I am "allowed" to 
use my favourite FrameMaker for large documents but have never 
used FrameMaker+SGML.

Excosoft is a very friendly company. We met them 2 or 3 times 
and their speed when working with Documentor is worth seeing. 
We had some graphic problems and they always answered our e-mails 
and telephone calls. Try out their free 30 day demo. However we 
never did solve the problem of vector graphics in XML documents.

They claim to have sold a lot of licences in the US, it would 
be interesting to hear if anyone outside Sweden has heard of 
Documentor.

Some of my comments could be out of date as it is over 6 months 
since I last experimented with Documentor.

/Sian (in Sweden)
--
Si=E2n Petersson                             sian@idasys.se
Technical Writer, Ida Systems Ab   Tel: +46 13 373727


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