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Participating Frequently
July 28, 2011
Question

Is FrameMaker the solution to our needs?

  • July 28, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 1041 views

I'm posting my question here because FrameMaker's product description sounds relevant to our needs.  Please consider the following senario and advise whether FrameMaker --or another Abode product --can accomplish the following...

Our company packages the same product in multiple sizes (SKU’s).  The product labels’ wording are essentially the same for each SKU with only minor adjustments (e.g. Net contents description, manufacturer details, etc.).

The original label content is owned by a team of technical writers.  They maintain a singular master document for a product family.  They give this master document to an editorial group that selectively extracts the content for each SKU and adds the missing details described above.  They, in turn, send these customized documents to our graphics department for layout.

The editorial group would like any belated changes made to the master document to flow automatically to the custom documents. Also, if a change is made to one custom document that should be made to all of the custom documents they would like it to occur automatically as well.  Ultimately, any belated changes to the custom documents would automatically update the final InDesign artwork.

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    1 reply

    Jeff_Coatsworth
    Community Expert
    Community Expert
    July 28, 2011

    Kind of sounds like overkill to me - FM is designed for long format documents because it came out of book publishing originally. FM doesn't "do" graphics as slickly as InDesign does. If all your labels are InDesign files, why not just maintain them only in InDesign? If you kept the text in FM, how were you thinking of getting it out to be ported into the InDesign files?

    T CoxAuthor
    Participating Frequently
    July 28, 2011

    Our product labels include Directions for Use booklets that can approach 100 (Word doc) pages.  The content itself is complex and meant to satisfy Government requirements.  Some paragraphs constitute a topic by themselves.

    I imagined FrameMaker would serve to manage canned information/topics that apply across a family of related products.  Is FrameMaker not used to perform the word processing?  I assumed that afterwards we could export the compiled text in a format that InDesign could import so that our art folks could apply the finishing touches (typesetting, graphics).

    Ian Proudfoot
    Legend
    July 28, 2011

    Are these product labels in any way related to the FDA's Structured Product Label requirements as used in the pharmaceutical industry? Or perhaps similar requirements for medical equipment?

    That sort of work is exactly what FrameMaker does very well.

    Ian