I’m not using Frame or InDesign anymore, but it’s always good when a tool adds features it’s missing.

You use text variables. You define a text variable, then insert a text variable marker. For instance, you can define variables for Heading 1, or Section 1, or whatever you choose. Then you can create your headers and footers on your master pages, and insert a text variable marker to pick up section titles, chapter names, or first instances of head 1. Then as you flow text, the variable gets picked up in your document. Try it, you’ll like it! I use it in long books and it works fine.

I think you can use the same technique for conditional text also.

InDesign CS4 just came out and includes cross references, but I haven’t used it yet, so I can’t comment on it, but I’m looking forward to it.

Peg

It sounds like things worked out for you in the way that the decisions unfolded. Two years ago, you probably would not have chosen MadCap Flare based on its early stage of development. Now you have experience with FrameMaker, Creative Suite, and MadCap Flare!

Once I knew that I would be transitioning from one company to another, I spent a tense three weeks assessing the available tools on the market. At that point, WebWorks had not yet released a FrameMaker 8.0-compatible product and did not hint at their impending release. At that point, it seemed like a slam dunk for my chosing Flare.

Once I was inside the culture of my current company, I could see that Help was just extra. As a startup, we just need a lot of quick docs. I decided to use InDesign for my stated reasons and because it seemed like my quickest path to a great looking template. I’m in production, it looks professional, and that is what counts.

As an aside, I almost chose OpenOffice as my primary authoring tool and even developed a book template for my company. I think it’s an extremely versatile tool (much more powerful than Word, very FrameMakerish, and free). I’d have chosen it were it not for the previously-stated workflow incentive to choose InDesign. OpenOffice can produce great-looking PDFs with bookmarks and you can also create a variety of paths to CHMs if you need a help system.

If OpenOffice use had been prevalent in the trenches at my company, I’d have considered it more strongly. It’s predominantly a Microsoft shop, so I could sense that it was a lost cause to develop an OpenOffice workflow. Luckily, InDesign plays nice with Word.

At some point, I expect our needs will expand and I’ll need to produce a help system and maintain multiple products, branches, audiences, and languages. At that point, I’ll convert to Flare via InDesign’s XML output. Meanwhile, I’m writing everything in topical chunks: concepts, procedures, reference, and figures.

I encourage other writers to take the opportunity to try out new tools and filters between them whenever the opportunity arises. Get past your “MUST DO DITA” preconceptions and ask yourself what your company really needs.

Most of the doc depts I’ve been involved in did not have the complexity or page count to warrant DITA. It was just the current buzz wagon to jump on. But if your company requires single-sourced, topic-based help and PDF, Flare and DITA seems like the way to go. What to choose for a content management system would be the next big question.

Thanks,

–Jared

Thanks for your thoughtful comments on Frame vs. InDesign. I wrote that post two years ago and I ended up going back to Frame for my main publishing tool (getting additional software was difficult at that point). About a year later, my company wanted me to create in-application help as well, so I made the case for a switch in software, and moved to MadCap Flare. Now I do all my authoring in Flare and produce great printed output with single-sourced online help.

Anyway, thanks again for your review; especially for the information on CS3, which I haven’t seen. I never upgraded my CS2 products to CS3.

I made that decision because the Marketing and Design departments at my new company were using InDesign and it seemed important to develop a work flow with them. Plus, I’d heard such great things about InDesign and CS3, and really wanted to learn Illustrator and more about Photoshop.

I don’t have to produce a help system, just PDFs. If I had to produce help or had multiple product lines to document using the same content (requiring conditional text or DITA), I would not have chosen InDesign.

With CS3, there is good support for indexing, headers and footers, and TOCs. A cross-reference plug-in is available from DTPtools that is very FrameMaker-like in its capabilities and it seems more intuitive. That’s and extra $130, but worth it.

With the help of our Design department, I developed a beautiful template that includes many of the paragraph and character styles that I used in FrameMaker. Meanwhile, I created DOC templates with the same style names, so I can import content authored in MS Word by subject matter experts. This import works surprisingly well and all the styles are mapped automatically. Likewise, it’s easy to output a DOC file if reviewers prefer it to a PDF (so they can directly edit the text).

Compared to FrameMaker, I have faster and easier control over the layout and the quality of the images are excellent and scale beautifully. This is important because I am documenting hardware as well as software and I’m using a lot more images than ever before.

Conditional text is a limitation. I have yet to find out whether there is a workaround for this.

So, I think InDesign CS3 is a valid choice for technical documentation as long as you don’t have to produce help or single-source your content. For basic PDF deliveries, it works well. InDesign PDFs can be enormous, so that is something to be careful about and there are some best practices to follow that are not immediately obvious.

If I wanted my life to be easy and wanted to be more productive, I’d have chosen FrameMaker. I’m not sure whether FrameMaker is actually easier or I’m just more used to it. I made the tougher choice because I also want to be part of a larger team, not preoccupied my own tech doc area.

Overall, I’m glad that I chose InDesign. It’s a much more powerful, up-to-date application and the PDFs look much better than anything I produced in FrameMaker. I don’t think that FrameMaker has changed significantly in the last 10, with the exception of support for DITA architecture, which has little bearing on the types of projects I’m working on. CS3 clearly gets a lot more of Adobe’s development resources than FrameMaker.

Thanks,

–Jared

Corel Ventura Publisher, which is like FrameMaker on ‘roids, has this. I am *SO* disappointed with Adobe. There are perhaps a half-dozen, certainly no more than a dozen, features which would take this tool into the realm of long-document publishing, bumping both FM and VP out of the limelight.

But, no. It’s been three iterations and many years, and Adobe still can’t get it together. I am annoyed.

I’ve tripped over color separation controls in Frame any number of times, though I’ve never had need for them, but I would assume that one could do such a thing in Frame.