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unum260
Participant
August 7, 2009
Question

Help on Framemakers abilities.

  • August 7, 2009
  • 2 replies
  • 929 views

I am research authoring tools for purchase at my company.  I have several questions on available features of Framemaker.  I have read the review but still have questions.  If anyone can help that would be great.  Here are the questions:

Does it have the ability to apply conditinal content dependent on output/presentation mode?

Does it allow for Developer and Contributor roles with unique permissions?

Can you reuse content "live" from CMS as opposed to republishing whole when individual chunks are updated?

Can you link to other content within content?

Does it provide enhance output functionality such as "hover"?

Is online help a separate output and does it provide a search function?

Can you create in a course of multiple sessions without publishing or submitting to a workflow?

Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you for your help!!

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    2 replies

    U
    unum260Author
    Participant
    August 7, 2009

    Thank you so much, Jeff.  This is a huge help.

    I have a couple more:

    Can Cascading stylesheets be stored exterior to the content?

    Does it enable developers to have a review/edit process within the tool for Content Review Workflow?

    Have a great day!!

    A
    Anonymous
    August 7, 2009

    Hi, Lisa,

    Given the range of questions you have, it seems like your need is for an integrated documentation system that might have FM as one of its core components, rather than looking at specific FM capabilities alone.

    There are several enterprise-level documentation tools that make use of FM as the "publishing engine". In some cases users of the system are not even aware that FM is being used. Or, some user roles know and use FM to create content or layouts, while other user roles have, say, a browser-based tool where they pick and choose components to be assembled into a document, press "submit", and their custom PDF is presented back to them -- making use of components that the first user group created -- but with absolutely no need to know or care that FM is in the background at all.

    Similarly, most documentation tools of this type would be able to use FM and various other 3rd party utilities to generate various different output formats -- PDFs, online help, reports, whatever -- depending on your particular requirements.

    To answer your question about CSS, absolutely yes, any tool that uses FM would be able to make use of externally stored CSS sheets to generate online help or whatever other types of content that reference the CSS.

    Review and editing in a workflow is another part of a doc system  -- again, FM could be used as a component in a documentation system that was used for a review and editing workflow, but the doc system itself would determine what capabilities were available from within FM.

    Given your posted info, I'm going to take a stab at imagining a requirement like:

    -- a content management system to store and manage text and graphics

    -- connection to databases to access data used in dynamic, customized documents

    -- the text, data from the database, and graphics would be used to create dynamically generated output documents

    -- the output documents would use a variety of formats, so there would be a "library" of document templates

    -- the output documents could be in a variety of formats (online help, web help, hardcopy printed, PDFs, html)

    -- an editorial workflow capability to manage the lifecycle of the content is needed

    If I'm close to the mark, then the answer is yes, FM would be ideal as one of the component tools in such a system, but it is only one of the core tools.

    Am I getting close to the 10,000-ft overview?

    Sheila

    U
    unum260Author
    Participant
    August 7, 2009

    Thank you.  This is great information.

    Lisa Gaudet

    [sig deleted by host]

    Jeff_Coatsworth
    Community Expert
    Jeff_CoatsworthCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    August 7, 2009

    FrameMaker isn't really a help authoring tool - it's more of a documentation authoring tool. FM can work in conjunction with a HAT like RoboHelp (through the Technical Communication Suite TCS) to create help output formats like WebHelp, CHMs, Adobe AIR, etc.

    So to answer your questions:

    1. yes - very strong on conditional text

    2. not really - that sounds more like a CMS function & FM isn't a CMS

    3. FM works with books that consist of .fm documents; they can be mixed & matched to suit whatever content you want (especially with structured FM)

    4. yes - very strong in cross-references and linking

    5. no - that sounds more like a feature of the help output

    6. yes & yes - but FM doesn't create the output - that's what RH is for

    7. not sure what you're talking about here - you can work on FM documents all you want without sending it to a help authoring tool; you control that

    Hope this helps a bit,

    Jeff

    U
    unum260Author
    Participant
    August 7, 2009

    Thanks Jeff,

    This is a huge help.

    Have a great day!

    Lisa Gaudet

    [sig deleted by host]

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