Re: FrameMaker Replacements

[Chuck Hastings <cwh2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Framers,

My expertise is modest compared to that of many of you.  I will report 
on my experience so far with
two authoring tools that I've recently tried out:  Open Office 1.1, and 
LyX.  Both are open-source
and may be downloaded FREE, and may not be well-known to Windows users.

Open Office, as I understand it, was originally developed by Sun but was 
released by Sun into the
freeware world as competition for Microsoft Word.  It handled a 2Mbyte 
novel as a single file, quite
well, for me recently.  It is much more like Word than like FrameMaker.  
It can deal well with .doc files
and with .rtf files, so there's more than one path from FrameMaker to 
Open Office and back.  I'm
running it under Ubuntu Linux, a recent South African import  (and also 
freeware)  which is designed
to be friendlier and less geekoid than some other versions of Linux, and 
more similar in some ways
to Windows in its look and feel.  Open Office has a somewhat different 
look and feel than Word, but
it can do most of the same things except for Word Count.  It comes with 
a somewhat restricted set of
fonts, but   (after some expert advice)  I was able to greatly expand 
its fonts repertoire.

LyX is a more human-friendly/less-geekoid front end for LaTeX, which is 
in turn a more human-friendly/
less-geekoid front end for TeX  (the typesetting program created by 
Donald Knuth).  Shockingly, the
LyX community seems utterly ignorant of the existence of FrameMaker, and 
LyX tutorials are full of
annoying geekoid putdowns of Word and of WordPerfect.  LyX is most of 
the way to word-processor
convenience, but not quite all the way;  and an author's freedom is 
severely restricted with respect to
such matters as spacing, which the geekoid contingent touts as an 
ADVANTAGE!.  On the plus side,
the LyX/LaTeX/TeX machinery WORKS.  And it's very strong in its ability 
to handle math and equations.


My comments:  I can foresee FrameMaker being thrust into the freeware 
domain by Adobe, as Open
Office was sent out into the world by Sun.  I'd love to see Linux 
FrameMaker revived, and consider its
abandonment by Adobe to have been a classic business booboo comparable 
to VW abandoning the original
Beetle, AMC abandoning the Javelin, and now GM abandoning the Camaro.  
(All of these were cars with
a ferociously loyal cult following.) 

Most of the things claimed by LyX partisans as extra capabilities, 
beyond those of Word and WordPerfect,
are things that FrameMaker DOES.  The astonishing zero overlap between 
the FrameMaker community and
the LyX/LaTeX  community is partly sociological;  FrameMaker is largely 
used in the for-profit world, and
LyX/LaTeX is mostly  (and very widely)  used in academia. 

But both Open Office and LyX/LaTeX do have two huge advantages:  (1)  
They're FREE, and once you have
either of them no company can try to take it away from you.  (2)  They 
run under Linux, like Mozilla Firefox and
Mozilla Thunderbird which shield you against viruses and spyware 
incomparably better than do Windows and
Internet Explorer respectively.

The original question was about handling long documents.  FrameMaker of 
course does this without even
breathing hard;  I used it for most work on my novel, and I didn't even 
bother separating chapters into files
and using the slick FrameMaker  'book'  feature.  I realize that perhaps 
some of you may not consider a
2Mbyte novel as a  'long document,' but it's long enough to have 
occasioned some hiccups when edited using
Microsoft Word.


Chuck Hastings                 Vintage Silicon Logic, 
Seattle                         cwh2@xxxxxxxxxxxxx


=============================================================================


Rick Quatro wrote:

> Hello Framers,
>
> With the recent discussion about the future of FrameMaker, perhaps a
> FrameMaker Replacements thread may be useful. Is anyone experimenting with
> other long-document programs out there? Can you give any information on
> pros, cons, features, etc., especially as they relate to FrameMaker?
>
> One particular interest I have is how other programs support scripting and
> automation.
>
> Note that this post is not meant to be an anti-Adobe rant or to further
> speculate on FrameMaker's future.
>
> Rick Quatro
> Carmen Publishing
> 585 659-8267
> rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> www.frameexpert.com
>
>
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