Tutorial Geared to FrameMaker Users?

[pdeitel]

Anyone know of a good tutorial for someone coming from FrameMaker?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I went from several years of doing advanced page layout in FM to (I think) CS2 or 3 InDesign. There just isn't much similar between the two; while FM has more advanced layout than Word, they're very much the same in general approach.

I think any series of InDesign basic lessons and tutorials will be as specific as needed, without much that could be added to address prior FM experience.

[pdeitel]

You consider InDesign to be a good authoring tool? Or is it primarily still a layout tool?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I've written more than one book in it, and finished many others from rough drafts. I like to work visually, which is why I moved to FM when it was the only good WYSI writing tool (and did several books in it, as well, long before the XML era).

If you're writing a lot of text and want full, easy editing and proofing tools, do it in Word (with an eye towards an ID import). If you can live with slightly less capable "word processing," ID makes a decent writing/development platform.

[pdeitel]

I guess I'd like to know more about the "slightly less capable" comment.

I've been working with framemaker since version three or four. We've written all our books using it for as long as I can remember. Given the lack of Mac support framemaker, as well as the current inability to install it in a windows VM on an M1 or M2 Mac, I am now looking for other options.

[James Gifford—NitroPress · Accepted solution]

Emphasis on "slightly." ID will do just about anything Word will, especially if you're "working to pages" and need the layout control more than every small word-processing feature of the latter. For instance, when users here are having trouble importing Word docs or trying to do complex things in ID after import, I usually recommend doing all the editing, cleanup, fixes, reformatting etc, in Word. Pulling as clean and organized a file as possible into ID just goes more smoothly, even though you can use ID search/replace, GREP, scripting etc. to do most of the same things.

I use a stripped and hot-rodded version of Word to do all long, continuous writing simply because it's more streamlined. But again, I've written complete, complex books right from a blank first page in ID, too.

I haven't had a working version of FM (7.2 was my last) for some time. I did an update of one of my oldest books, and couldn't find my 7.2 disks and didn't want to pay for the Tech Suite just to move it to ID. So I pulled the Word version out of an original PDF and went from there to a Kindle edition from ID in a few days.

I more recently got FM again, and was mildly surprised to find it so... primitive even after a decade of updates. I think you'll appreciate InDesign a lot, although it has none of the zillion Esc-key shortcuts. (I still have those in digital memory although I can't remember what most do!)