Dragaera

Writing tools

Mon Oct 27 20:40:40 PST 2003

On Thu, 23 Oct 2003 11:16:53 -0500, you 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).
>
>Regards,
>
>johne (phy) cook
>wisconsin, usa
I used to use FrameMaker for documentation tasks (maintaining hundreds
of pages of program specifications), I have used some version of emacs
since 1978.

First, it is perhaps a little known fact that FrameMaker has (or at
least had) many emacs key bindings built in, so that emacs users could
do many things the way they were used to if they were using
FrameMaker.

For the most part, writing the text of a novel is much different that
controlling the layout of a novel (or a manual or specification).
Steven probably wants as little intrusion as possible of the format
into the process of writing.

Emacs will wrap paragraphs; perform search and replace; cut and paste;
and allow multiple windows containing either the same file or
different files to be displayed.  Since it does not fancy formatting,
it performs well on underpowered hardware.  It's available for free.

FrameMaker is definitely a publishing tool, and it handles long,
complicated material (with figures, footnotes, cross references,
tables of contents, fancy paragraph styles) well and consistently.
(I would much rather use Frame than Microsoft Word for almost
anything.)

If you focus on the simplest possible formats (perhaps three paragraph
types:  Chapter Title, Chapter First Paragraph, Other paragraph), you
could Frame to be out of the way enough for the writing task.  Later
you could do the formatting.

Sometimes I think of programs like Frame as, "What You See Is What You
Fiddle With."  When you are fiddling, you are not writing.

escargo


David S. Cargo (escargo at skypoint.com)