All- I'm a prospective Flare purchaser and have question for those who've used FrameMaker 8 or 9 and Flare 5: With regard to general editing, formatting, project management, versioning, PDF outputs, quick writing jobs, etc; do you find than any type of operation is LESS efficient in Flare 5 (of Blaze) than in FrameMaker? In the course of using Flare, do you find yourself sometimes returning FrameMaker to get certain work done, or at least wishing Flare could do an operation more like the way FrameMaker does?
(Please don't factor in a learning curve. Assume you are already proficient with both platforms.)
I like what I've seen so far in the Flare 5 trial version, but wanted to get the opinions of some experienced users.
Thanks very much in advance for your comments.
-Kurt Euler
Any lost effeciencies moving from Frame to Flare?
Re: Any lost effeciencies moving from Frame to Flare?
They're fairly different tools with different strengths, so any comparison depends a lot on what you plan to do with them.
I used FrameMaker (7) with WebWorks, so I found very few negatives when moving to a proper single-sourcing tool like Flare to produce our print and help outputs. If I was working only with print outputs, and using more advanced layout or printing options, then I guess my experience would be different.
The one thing I do find missing in Flare is revision marking (change bars); there's no adequate way to do this.
I used FrameMaker (7) with WebWorks, so I found very few negatives when moving to a proper single-sourcing tool like Flare to produce our print and help outputs. If I was working only with print outputs, and using more advanced layout or printing options, then I guess my experience would be different.
The one thing I do find missing in Flare is revision marking (change bars); there's no adequate way to do this.
Re: Any lost effeciencies moving from Frame to Flare?
Frame is more flexible when it comes to running headers and footers. If there's a way to put a non-heading style paragraph in a header, I haven't found it. Frame's page layout tools are easier to use too - the page designer in Flare needs a major rework.
If I was just doing PDFs, I'd stick with Frame. I think it'll take Flare a release or two to get the print output issues I've run into straightened out. But for online output and simple single sourcing, it's great. And the topic orientation and master projects make it easy to manage shared information across projects - something that's a royal pain to do in Frame.
If I was just doing PDFs, I'd stick with Frame. I think it'll take Flare a release or two to get the print output issues I've run into straightened out. But for online output and simple single sourcing, it's great. And the topic orientation and master projects make it easy to manage shared information across projects - something that's a royal pain to do in Frame.
Re: Any lost effeciencies moving from Frame to Flare?
Interesting comments. Thanks!
Re: Any lost effeciencies moving from Frame to Flare?
One more comment to this post:
As much as I like Flare, I think FrameMaker is better at handling text on a page. It just looks better in FrameMaker. I've tried replicating the settings for the FM styles on the Flare css, but can't get the text to look the same. (Of course, I just might not be that good at writing style sheets...)
Plus, my client has some very specific needs -- such as tables that run across multiple pages, where we need the "Table 2 (Continued)" header. Also different date formats to use with the variables. These are not available in Flare yet.
I work around this by re-importing the FM styles into the generated document. I'm not ready to abandon FrameMaker just yet.
As much as I like Flare, I think FrameMaker is better at handling text on a page. It just looks better in FrameMaker. I've tried replicating the settings for the FM styles on the Flare css, but can't get the text to look the same. (Of course, I just might not be that good at writing style sheets...)
Plus, my client has some very specific needs -- such as tables that run across multiple pages, where we need the "Table 2 (Continued)" header. Also different date formats to use with the variables. These are not available in Flare yet.
I work around this by re-importing the FM styles into the generated document. I'm not ready to abandon FrameMaker just yet.