Re: Mainstream publishing could use footnotes [was 'RE: But what about the FOOTNOTES???']

[" David Neeley" <dbneeley@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, everyone!

The driving force for Frame development at Adobe is and has been the large customer market. Thus, they move strongly to fold in features that matter to these customers and potential customers, while not providing much in the way of resources to "fix" features that go begging from edition to edition.

When it became apparent that major customers were preparing to abandon Frame to go to XML editors instead, a crash project was initiated to give Frame round-trip XML capability--hence, Frame 7. (True round-tripping will not exist, however, until Frame can use the XML schema or DTD both in and out, becoming somewhat less dependent upon the EDD which is unique to Frame).

As for indexing, if the Frame capabilities were adequate, there would be no need for a tool such as IXGen. Further, in the publishing industry relatively few people are competent at indexing, which is why there are still independent indexers. Sadly, there are also relatively few technical writers who do a sufficient job at this task, either. Insofar as those publishing firms who employ indexers is concerned, re-running Sky or Cindex on the reformatted file isn't difficult or expensive.

I should add that improving skill in indexing should be a priority item for technical writers. It is necessary to understand the principles well in order to create proper hypertext entries, for example, that are of maximum use to readers of the documents we produce and who are accessing them in electronic formats such as Acrobat.

To me, their biggest mistake of all is not producing a "Frame Lite" product, comparable to Photoshop Elements compared to the full product. This would allow customers to have a cheap method of producing Frame files for non-publishers on their staff and eliminate the constant conversion hassles we all know and "love"--engineering documents, for instance, could be authored in such product without having to employ Word or some other tool and then add to our workload in making publishable documents. In my view, so long as such a tool is not available, Adobe will continue to encounter excessive resistance to moving to Frame in shops who simply do not think the expense of full Frame licenses for their engineering and development staff is worthwhile.

David


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