RE: Solving the Doc Review/Exchange Problem (long response)

["Linda G. Gallagher" <lindag@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Andrew,

I don't know anything about S-Tagger, but here're my experiences with your
other options.

<snip>

<* Output to PDF and have reviewers insert comments. This approach could
take
advantage of Acrobat's digital signature feature, and the writer at the end
of the process could simply generate a list of the comments. The downside to
this approach is that the reviewer has to insert a comment for each change,
and it requires that the reviewer have the "full" version of Acrobat 5.0
(but only "Acrobat Standard" for 6.0, it seems).>

I've used this method a bit. Admitted with Acro 4 and it's OK for a few
comments, but I found it to be a real pain with lots of comments. Printing
the annotations seemed to much out of context, especially when comments from
more than one person were about the same thing. Viewing all the little
sticky notes one page at a time was very tedious, but the only thing that
worked for me. Maybe Acro 5 and 6 do this better.

<* Output to RTF using something like Mif2Go, and then review in Word.
Because you can use revision tracking as well as comments, this approach
makes use of the advantages Word does indeed have over FrameMaker (not
something you'll hear me say often). If graphics aren't necessary, you don't
even need a third-party plug-in or conversion utility -- you can just Save
As from Frame.>

I do this for a couple of clients. It's still a bit of a pain, but with the
dual-monitor system that I have, I open the Frame file and the marked up
..rtf file and copy and paste as needed (or delete).

Some clients just send an e-mail message with page references and
explanation of changes. Sometimes they'll copy in small snippets from the
PDF to help see where they're talking about.

I know this will sound old fashioned, but I truly prefer hard copy markups
for small things and Word files for larger chunks of content.

I'm also curious to see if others have found better solutions.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Linda G. Gallagher
TechCom Plus
Technical writing, help development,
FrameMaker and WebWorks Publisher conversions
lindag@techcomplus.com
http://www.techcomplus.com/
303-450-9076
800-500-3144
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Co-Manager
Consulting and Independent Contracting Special Interest Group
Society for Technical Communication
http://www.stcsig.org/cic/index.html
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



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