October TLE

[The Holy Saint, Grand High Poobah, Master of Monkeys, Ehlers]

PageMaker = teh suck.

The previous person in my position was using PageMaker for everything. The first thing I do when I get a project now is get that corrected.

[Peter Ahlstrom]

Hm. I may need to tell my boss about this software...

Well, if you need these features:

1. ID has no autonumber facility: hence, it cannot support automatic bullet (or other glyph) lists, or numbered lists, or numbered headings and subheads ( very common in industrial documentation), no table or figure captions numbered automatically based on chapter number.
2. ID has no facility comparable to FM cross-references. (It is possible to give a page-number reference that is dynamically filled in, but the reference is only to a text frame where the current story continues, not to a paragraph or a sentence.) Not only can you not place page-number references to arbitrary text, you can't pick up paragraph text for re-use from,e.g., a glossary. The only way to quote text from elsewhere in the document is to copy and paste.
3. ID has no facility comparable to FM user variables. No way to incorporate boilerplate text that can be globally changed later, or by importing a different style document. (Not all such uses can be replaced by global find/replace.)
4. ID has no facility comparable to FM conditional text. Flawed as it is, conditional text is widely used and where it is used, is integral to the document design. There would be no substitute except to replace the FM document with <n> ID documents, one for each conditional variation.
5. The ID "Inline frame" is equivalent of an anchored frame positioned "below current line" with a baseline offset. There does not seem to be an equivalent of an anchored frame with any other positioning attribute, for example, "at top of column," "at end of column," outside column on binding edge, etc. Maybe I missed it but I don't think there is any way to anchor a graphic beside text and have it move with the text in editing.
6. ID has no support for mathematical expressions or equations. It may well be that its elaborate typographical controls permit equally nice output to FM's Equation support, but certainly achieving it will require more hand-labor.
7. ID does not completely implement the FM concept of "As Is" as a style value, so that you can create a character style that applies only the italic attribute, or only a different point size, but leaves all other font features unchanged. Some features in the Character Style definition dialog allow a "not specified" setting, but font family and size are always changed. This makes it impossible, for example, to have a character style "Signal Name" that works equally well in both 12-pt Garamond body text and 9-pt Helvetica figure call-outs.
8. ID has no facility comparable to the FM "global update options" in the Paragraph and Character Designers. That is, there is no simple way to change the font family, or the hyphenation rule, of all paragraph styles simultaneously. To change the document font entirely, edit every Style definition. (But see next item)
9. When a para or char style definition is updated, paras having that style are not automatically updated to use the new style. Instead, when you select one of them, a plus sign appears in the style palette showing that the selected text has a modified version of the style. If there's a global way to enforce an updated style, I don't know what it is. (For a book, the Book palette command Synchronize? But in a document?)
10. You can't paste plain text, when the source of the copied text was styled. For example if you copy text from a browser window, or from a user-supplied Word document, it will paste into ID retaining its styles, colors and font from the source. The editor then has to rationalize the formatting manually.

then FrameMaker is the only choice (though I'm really not sure the list is completely correct on items 7 through 10; these issues may be fixed already).

[Nessa]

Hey, I heard this was being printed, and the website says it's out...did it get mailed? Not that I am subscribing, even though I used to say it should be mandatory for every former editor to subscribe, but I noticed that it has not shown up yet on Locus in the list of magazines received, and it's already the end of November.

I finally got my issue in the mail today.

[Oldie Black Witch]

Yup. Mr. M got it back from the printer on Tuesday.

[Spriggan]

Well, if you need these features:
then FrameMaker is the only choice (though I'm really not sure the list is completely correct on items 7 through 10; these issues may be fixed already).

Was just watching the training video CD that came with my educational version of CS2 and #s 9-10 are "fixed" (I hate to use that word since they weren't bugs but design choices), don't know about the others though.  InDesign is MUCH more complicated then my little Freehand (which was a hybrid of Illustrator and InDesign done by Marcomedia), Adobe products can be quite overwhelming when you first start to learn them.