Andreas Siegert wrote:
on 02/08/2007 05:37 PM Pete Holsberg said the following:
Graham Smith produced the following on 2/8/2007 2:35 AM:
http://www.techwr-l.com/techwhirl/magazine/technical/replaceframewithwriter.html
Hmmm... "What matters is not how the comparisons are weighted, but that
they can be reasonably made at all. Users of Writer may wish for some
features of FrameMaker. They may need to adjust to a different logic and
layout. However, so long as they take the time to learn Writer, they can
be in little doubt that they are using software that competes with
FrameMaker on its own terms, and wins as often it loses. Even ignoring
the cost and philosophical differences, OpenOffice.org is clearly an
acceptable alternative to FrameMaker."
Hmm, I wonder how much work he did with OO Writer...
I will have to buy an update to my old FM license pretty soon as OO Writer
is sadly miles away from what is needed for reliable book writing:
Images jump around, TOCs show differently than specified, PDF export kills
color profiles in images, style definitions are a messed up hodgepodge
(bulleting/headings/lists are partly outside of the regular styles, partly
inside and the interdependency is not documented, yuck!)
I use OO Writer on a daily basis for simple medium sized documents, but I
would not trust it for book projects.
I'd have to agree with this. OO is an excellent tool, and can compete
successfully against other wordprocessors -- but at the end of the day
it is just a wordprocessor, not a typesetter or documentation engine.
Quite apart from the problems Andreas identifies, OO (in common with all
wordprocessors) has no proper concept of hierarchical structure or
containment, which are essential for any structured document that you
want to be persistent, robust, and reusable. The author of the article
clearly has little experience of the internals of the publishing
production process.
FM satisfies most of those three criteria, although I would query its
reusability, especially the XML export, which still has some serious
problems. XML itself (and I don't mean ODF or WordML, which are just
XML-ized expressions of the wordprocessor visual display) also satisfies
those requirements, but there are no XML editors suitable for use by the
non-technical author[1]. LaTeX satisfies Andreas' requirements for
stability, PDF quality, robust styles, and comprehensive documentation,
but it is not very reusable and also lacks full containment in its
default document classes.
OO scores heavily on the stability of the interface over Word, where you
only have to breathe for things to start reformatting themselves, but a
competitor for professional documentation systems it is not...yet. It
*could* be, but it would require a radical rethink of the interface as
well as the underlying document structure.
///Peter
--
1. Flynn, P. "If XML is so easy, how come it’s so hard?" Extreme Markup
Conference, Montreal, August 2006 (http://epu.ucc.ie/articles/extreme06)
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