Johne Cook wrote: > I'm a Tech Writer by day and use Adobe FrameMaker (on Win2k) for the books, > manuals, and lesser instructions and notes that I write. I also use ACDSee > for the quick, fairly basic image manipulations that I do (mostly editing > screenshots for inclusion in the various documents). > > I know Steve mentioned emacs and Xemacs in the weblog. I'm wondering if > anyone out there has used both Frame and emacs and what your relative > experiences have been. > > I'm using FrameMaker 7 at home as I work on my first novel ( because I can > change document properties in one place and have them update immediately > across the entire document, and because it's what I'm used to). I've used both, fairly extensively. FrameMaker 3, 4, 5, and 5.5, both on SunOS, Solaris and Windows (none of the newer ones though). Emacs since 18 something or other, again on SunOS, Solaris and Windows. XEmacs in there in various places, including when it was Lucid Emacs (now that was a great product...). IMO, Frame is a document preperation and layout system - it's excells at laying out your technical manuals with mixed text and graphics, text wrapping around graphics and so on. Various fonts, formats, indexing, and so on. It can do large bodies of text well (we used it for large technical documents, like what you seem to use it for, 100's of pages), and it does fine at that. Frame focuses much more on the visual layout of the text, with things like style sheets, master pages, and so on. I *loved* it for it's consistency - once you figure it out, *everything* works the same way - as opposed to something like Word, which is a pile of crap. It stores (or at least stored) it's documents in a proprietary format. Emacs on the other hand is a pure text editor, largely focusing on programming (C, C++, Lisp, any kind of programming really) but it does a fine job on any type of text. It's endlessly and easily programmable (more than the versions of Frame I used) so you can setup macros and other things to do exactly what you want with text. But it doesn't do graphics and it doesn't do page layout. It doesn't (or at least not that I'm aware of) have anything like Master pages and the like in Frame. In fact, the concept of pages is pretty much ignored - you let LaTex (or whatever layout system you're using) handle that, just focus on the text - which is probably why Steven likes it. It's fast and fairly simple to use and stores it's documents in plain text format. Everything can be done with the keyboard, so no mouse is needed (or wanted really). It blends well with things like LaTeX for document prep. But it's not WYSISYG. I still use Emacs today (both NTEmacs and regular Emacs, haven't touched XEmacs in a while). 90% of the documents I write start out as text documents in Emacs and get imported to Word if I need anything fancy. I haven't touched Frame since 5.5 - it's just too expensive for ordinary use. I actually use JED, which is a much smaller simpler Emacs-like editor, for most things. But IMO, nothing beats Emacs' integration with GDB for debugging programs. Well, that's my $0.02. If you haven't used Emacs at all, try NTEmacs (http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/windows/ntemacs.html) - and remap the Ctrl key to be next to the 'A' key, where it's meant to be. Otherwise, you'll break your fingers. It includes a tutorial (Ctrl-h t) that'll get you started. Pete Flugstad