FrameMaker and Word: One User's Perspective

April, 2001 - This is a long overdue update of this article, which I originally wrote in 1999. Changes since the last version are indicated by green text.

I've been working with FrameMaker on a daily basis for about 3 years, both in my current job at Daleen Technologies and prior to that at Solect Technology Group. Prior to Solect, I was working at Dow Jones Markets (now a part of Bridge Communications), where I used Word pretty much exclusively. At Dow Jones Markets, I was able to take a couple of FrameMaker courses and do some document conversion (Word to Frame and vice versa), so I wasn't a complete novice with FrameMaker when I moved to Solect and had to start using FrameMaker intensively. I now manage a documentation group of three writers; all of us use FrameMaker 6 and WebWorks Publisher 5 to produce printed and online documentation.

Prior to working with FrameMaker, I was a (reasonably) happy user of Microsoft Word. I've used it since Word for DOS 2.0. Over the last decade, the program has evolved into a powerful, intuitive writing tool that deserves its commanding hold on the marketplace. Word 2000 is an excellent tool for writing and editing. But as good as it is (and in most respects Word 2000 is very good), Word has definite limitations when it comes to working with long, complex technical documents -- the type of documents that technical writers have to produce.

My opinion: FrameMaker is best suited to big documents or documents that consist of many files. However, Word is friendlier and much easier to edit with. After using Word 2000, working with FrameMaker feels like stepping back to 1992. While FrameMaker generally deserves its reputation for being able to handle large complex documents, I still believe that almost anything that you can do in Frame you can also do in Word, if you know Word well enough. Some job requirements (colour separations, for example) may require you to use Frame, but in many other areas the distinction is not so clear cut and Word's ease of use and macro capabilities may balance Frames superior cross-referencing and multiple file support.

You will see below that most of my complaints about Frame have to do with lack of features and its dated interface. I can't imagine using Word to do some of the documents that I've produced in the last couple of years, or to produce the volume of work that my group has done. On the other hand, I've wasted much time working around Frame's limitations (lack of HTML import, for example) or performing repetitive tasks that would have been trivial to automate in Word.

It's unfortunate that there isn't more competition in the long document publishing area. FrameMaker is just about the only realistic option there. If Adobe had more competition, they might be inclined to speed up the glacially slow pace of FrameMaker upgrades. As it is, I use Frame because there isn't an alternative.

I am keeping an eye on the Linux/open source community. It's clear that the future of technical publishing will involve content management tools, probably using some variant of XML or SGML. KWord, for example, is one tool that's worth watching - although it doesn't appear to have any content management features, at least its native format is XML.

Read on and see what you think. Comments are welcome..

The good
The bad
The different
The ugly

The good

These are things that I especially like about FrameMaker:

• Cross referencing is much easier in Frame than in Word. You can easily cross reference across documents. You can also set up custom cross-reference formats; i.e., you can have Frame put in the quote marks and the words `on page' in a cross-reference of the format, see "Cross-reference" on page 10.
• Spell-checking allows personal, document, and site dictionaries. All of these are editable (though I should add, that on the occasion that I did try to edit the spelling dictionary following the instructions in the manual, Frame would not accept the edits).
• Table formats can be customized and saved. This makes it possible to create a new table in one step, complete with a numbered caption and all cells formatted with the proper paragraph formats and rulers. This is a major time-saver. Large tables don't seem to have any affect on document performance, as they do in Word.
• The paragraph and character format selection lists can be left open as windows, resized, and placed on-screen as is convenient.
• You can apply a graphic (i.e., a logo) to a paragraph style. This is useful for things like "Warning" paragraphs, where you can apply the symbol with the paragraph.
• Frame handles side heads easily.
• Frame has conditional text, with as many conditions as you can handle. (There are limitations, see The Bad below).
• Numbering options are much more flexible and more reliable than in Word. You can also easily define custom series for things like steps. Frame 6 has built-in variables to handle chapter and volume numbering.
• Export to PDF is straightforward and can create bookmarks, links, and other PDF features.
• With one exception, Frame seems to be quite a bit faster than Word, both in screen redraws and in moving around the document, especially in documents with tables. Printing is faster and there's none of that silly document repagination that Word loves to do. The exception is refresh of graphics, which is quite a bit slower than in Word.
• Frame's master pages make it easy to change page layouts within a document.
• You can rotate text in table cells, for example, when you want narrow columns. (Word can now do this, but text can only be vertical.)
• You can print a rotated page with standard headers, i.e., the text in landscape mode and the headers and footers in portrait mode. Word can't do this.
• You can easily print lists of just about anything in your document. (You can do it with Word too, but you'll have to write a macro.)
• Frame has good colour support, including CMYK and Pantone colours. If you need to use colour in your documentation, Frame wins over Word, hands down.
• Frame supports double-byte character sets, e.g., Japanese.
• In Frame 6, Adobe added a number of cross-book features, including the ability to search and spell-check a whole book. These features make dealing with large books much easier and for me, justified the upgrade from version 5.5.6 to 6.0.
• Although it's not really part of FrameMaker, WebWorks Publisher is a powerful tool that will give you complete control over your output if you want to produce HTML, XML, or RTF for help files. MIF2GO is cheaper, easier to use, but not quite as powerful. Either tool will give far better HTML output than Word.

The bad

These are things that I don't like because they work better in Word or features that Frame doesn't have. Items are listed roughly in order of importance.

• FrameMaker for Windows has no macro capability. This is a major issue, especially considering the power of the Visual Basic for Applications that is built into the Microsoft Office products. I've been using Macro Express to automate some repetitive actions (such as resizing columns in tables) but it's a poor substitute for a real macro language with hooks into the program's command set. This is my biggest beef with FrameMaker by a wide margin. There is an add-on product called FrameScript that hooks into Frame and provides capabilities similar to VBA. It's not as well integrated with Frame as VBA is with Word (there's no IDE, for example), but it's about as powerful otherwise. Adobe really should buy out the company or license the product and bundle it with Frame. FrameScript is a Windows-specific product, unfortunately for Mac and UNIX users. On the other hand, Mac users can use Frame with Applescript and UNIX users have FMBatch.
• Frame doesn't support drag-and-drop text manipulation. The book window in Frame 6 does allow drag and drop manipulation of files. Frame+SGML allows drag and drop manipulation of book elements so you can use it to rearrange paragraphs or list items, for example. This would take place of an outliner, which is another feature from Word that I really miss.
• Frame doesn't support right-click cut and paste of selected text. If you right-click in a selection to get the context menu with the cut or paste command, the selection is lost. You have to go to the Edit menu or use keyboard commands. It's annoying if you are used to using this in other programs.
• Undo is limited to one action only.
• There is no on-the-fly spell checking, as there is in Word. (Some people hate this feature, to be true, but you can turn it off if you don't want it.)
• There is no grammar checker. Again some people loathe grammar checkers, but I find them useful as they will catch errors that the spell checker misses. Judicious setting of the rule options makes a big difference in their usefulness.
• There is no HTML import filter. I've been forced to import HTML documents into Frame by first converting them into Word documents.
• HTML export is cumbersome, buggy, and produces needlessly complex HTML. To a large extent, this has been remedied in FrameMaker 6 with the inclusion of WebWorks Standard. However, anyone who needs to do any serious HTML export from Frame will need to upgrade to WebWorks Professional, as you can't modify the templates that come with WebWorks Standard. This is a substantial expenditure, both in money and time.
• Frame's screen refresh leaves a lot to be desired. Updating text and formatting constantly leaves garbage on screen, which you have to clear with the CTRL-L command. Word's WYSIWYG is generally cleaner, though it too has it's idiosyncracies.
• While revised text can be marked with revision bars, you cannot identify changed text by colour (or by author) as you can in Word. You can apply inserted and deleted condition tags, but I don't see a way of doing this automatically, other than by using the document compare feature.
• Search and replace has no pattern matching feature. There is a Use Wildcard feature and you can match text copied from the clipboard. Word is more powerful here, including support for regular expressions.
• Frame is not very customizable and what customization is available is much more difficult than customizing Word. You can customize toolbars and keystroke commands by editing configuration files. For good tips on customizing Frame, see the Resources section at www.microtype.com.
• The list selection mechanism for selecting a paragraph format from the list is different from Word in that if you select the list and type a letter to jump to the first paragraph format that has a name starting with that letter, it selects and applies the first paragraph starting with that letter. For example, say you have a List Bullet paragraph that you want change back to Body Text. You select the paragraph format list and type the letter `B'. The paragraph immediately changes to the Bibliography style, which is the first paragraph format that starts with the letter `B'. I believe that this violates the standard Windows selection mechanism for lists; it certainly is different from the way it's implemented in Word and other MS Office programs. It's not as convenient, either. However, you can use the quick keys keystroke shortcut commands instead of the menus, which is faster, and works the way that you'd expect.
• ALT-click is supposed to allow you to copy text without going to the clipboard, but I haven't been able to get that one working.
• PAGE DOWN really is page down. If you want to get to the bottom of page, you have to scroll. (If you use Frame on a PC, I strongly recommend using Microsoft's Intellimouse with the wheel between the buttons. You can use the wheel to scroll in Frame and most other Windows applications. This is a major time and wrist saver.) You can change the behaviour of the PAGE DOWN key (and others). For details see the excellent articles at www.microtype.com.
• There is no generic 'repeat last action' command. You can repeat the last paragraph and character formatting commands, but that's all.
• The mechanism for globally updating paragraph styles works exactly backwards to the way that I (and all the other writers in my group) would expect it to work. You select the style that you are updating to, and then select the style you are updating from.
• You can't open two parts of a document in separate windows.
• The method for inserting graphics into text and anchoring them is cumbersome. You have to create an anchored frame, then insert the graphic into the frame, then manually resize the graphic. Graphic placement and resizing (as well as cropping) are easier in Word. In general, I consider the implementation of frames in FrameMaker to be about half-broken. On the other hand, things generally stay where you put them.
• You can't print a discontinuous range of pages (other than odd or even). In Word, you can select a range of pages such as 1,3,6-8,11-12,14.
• In the Find/Change dialog box, while there's a drop-down list to help you select the type of thing to search for (i.e., Paragraph Tag, Marker Text, etc.), there's no corresponding drop-down list to help you select the particular instance of the object that you've selected. In other words, you can select `Paragraph Tag' from a drop-down list, but then you have to manually enter the particular paragraph tag that you want to search for.
• Support for standard Windows keyboard conventions is mixed. CTRL-C, CTRL-X, and CTRL-V work, and the standard ALT+letter combinations work for menus. But the ESC key is used to implement many keyboard shortcuts, so ESC cannot be used to close an open dialog box. This is arguably one of Frame's strengths, because the program works the same way on different platforms, but I'd rather see the program adhere more closely to the standards of the OS that it's running on at the risk of losing some cross-platform compatibility, or have the ability to customize the behaviour of the ESC key to fit the way I want it to work.
• There doesn't appear to be an option to set the zoom level to the width of the line of text. However, the zoom levels are customizable.
• The Find command will keep cycling through a document. It doesn't stop or warn you after it's searched the complete document. It just lets you keep going.
• Table formats don't include column width information. You have to size each column in each table manually. However, once you've created a table and sized it the way you want, you can store it in the table catalog and the column widths will be maintained when you create new tables based on it.
• FrameMaker doesn't move the Find dialog or the spell-check dialog out of the way when it highlights selected text.
• It is cumbersome to import single styles or groups of styles from a document or template. Frame needs the equivalent of Word's Template Organizer.
• Frame's styles aren't hierarchical. In Word, you can define styles so that changes to Heading 1, for example, will ripple through all lower-level headings. You can't do this in Frame.
• Frame lacks a style catalog. There are third-party utilities (mifmuncher, for example) that provide some of this functionality, but it would be nice to have it built into the product, especially considering the complexity of Frame's style options.
• Footnote support is poor. Footnotes cannot span pages. It may be difficult to use Frame for things like academic papers because of this, although footnotes are less common in user guides and the like.
• Many Frame dialogs don't behave the way you'd expect. For example, in the Acrobat Setup dialog box, you can't select multiple paragraph formats to move them into the bookmark or don't bookmark columns. The same is true for other dialogs in which you have to select many items. You end up clicking and clicking and clicking ...

The different

These are things that are different from Word, but not necessarily good or bad.

• Pagination of sections is quite different. If you need to change pagination, the best thing to do is to put the next section in a new file as pagination changes are controlled at the file level. This is cumbersome in Word, but easy to handle in Frame. Overall, it's about the same level of complexity as working with sections in Word.
• Positioning of tables is different. In Word, a table acts just like a paragraph, it is positioned where the insertion point is when you create the table. In Frame, the table is positioned by an anchored frames and the default is to position the table one line below the frame anchor. So when you insert a table, your insertion point should be at the end of the line above where you want the table to go.
• Frame's indexing mechanism offers more control over the output of your entries than Word's. On the other hand, it's easier to input entries in Word. However there is a third-party indexing tool called IXgen, which is available from Frank Stearns Associates. I recommend this highly.

The ugly

These are bugs or things that have caused me problems..

• Frame changes my cursor scheme, which uses large mouse pointers, to it's own standard small cursor whenever the mouse is in the editing window. This is really annoying. I've contacted Adobe to see if there is a workaround but so far I haven't heard back from them. This did not get fixed in 5.5.3 or in 5.5.6, or in 6.0. The workaround is to press CTRL while moving the mouse, which changes the cursor to a small arrow.
• CTRL-click selects the current text flow. When I was first using Frame, I managed to completely mangle my document by using it. Multiple-level undo would have helped me out of a mess. I've learned to be careful.
• There are bugs in the cross-reference mechanism. Cross references to paragraph styles (headings, for example) don't always work. The work around is to insert a cross-reference marker.
• Frame crashes occasionally. I found two reproducible ways of crashing Frame 5.5.6 and had a few other non-reproducible crashes with both 5.5.6 and 6.0. It's more stable than Word but you can break it.
• Some users, myself included, have had problems with Frame locking up when used with the Intellimouse. In my case, disabling the wheel button solved the problem. This occurs under Windows 98 but not under Windows NT.
• Frame's WYSIWYG is not very WYG at some zoom resolutions. I have found that the apparent amount of space at the end of a line can vary substantially from one zoom level to another. I went crazy for a while, trying to figure out why my line was breaking when it looked like there was ample space. There is a configuration file setting (use printer metrics, I believe) that fixes this problem, but it's not the default.

Keith Soltys -- ksoltys@home.com,