Benefits/disadvantages of publishing a PDF from FM over RH?

[adrianaharper]

Hi everyone...

Quick question. Is anyone aware of any benefits and/or disadvantages to publishing a PDF file out of FM over RH?  We are creating both PDF and online help, and screen shots in PNG format (not resized) in FM published to PDF don't look nice... PNG screen shots (not resized) in FM, imported into RH and then generated as both PDF and/or webhelp look great in both formats.

I'm wondering what I am missing if I generate my PDF from RH as opposed to FM...

TIA,

Adriana

[Captiv8r]

Hi there

As I understand it, the primary intent of Frame is to produce printed output. RoboHelp's primary intent is to produce on-line content. So if you have stuff in Frame, it makes sense to import to RoboHelp to then produce on-line. I mean CHM, WebHelp or FlashHelp here.

As Frame is capable (I think) of going directly to PDF, I'd say to use it to directly produce the PDF. If you ship to RoboHelp, you are converting three times. Once to create HTML topics, once to create the Word document and a third time to create the PDF from the Word document. Consider each conversion a potential issue point.

Cheers... Rick

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[Art_Campbell1]

I'd tend to agree (as a long-time Framer who's here to pick up RH tips). FrameMaker was built on the book-publishing model, although that's expanded a lot to include single-source information hosting, XML, and other odds and ends.

But bottom line is that it has pretty sophisticated typography controls built in -- letter kerning and letter space controls, hyphenation dicti0onaries and so on. So your PDF is likely to look better if you output from Frame rather than RH because RH doesn't, so far as I know, include any tools to optimize output for print or PDF.

Art

[adrianaharper]

Thank you both- I would tend to agree with your observations so far, in that FM is far more customizable/flexible when generating PDFs.  I will update if I discover something to the opposite.

-A