moriarty@tc.fluke.COM (Jeff Meyer) (02/24/88)
I'm an idiot for getting into this argument, but since I use FrameMaker
everyday and have been a MacGuy for about three years, I thought I should
comment:
No question that, for page layout, FrameMaker is the easiest to use, and
gives you quite a bit of power. It's always struck me as an improved
Ready-Set-Go! program than PageMaker, and it supports Word Processing far
more than PageMaker. I just wish you could move the cursor inside prompt
boxes with the mouse (talk about culture shock).
However, I have a lot of friends who are graphic artists in Seattle who have
a love-hate relationship with PageMaker. They hate the interface, but it
gives them the extra 30% to do certain things that no other product allows
them to do (including FrameMaker -- I had two of them examine it and point
out it's deficiencies in detail). They'd prefer using a better interface,
but PageMaker 3.0 is the only program out there with the power to do the
really fancy stuff they want, for advertising displays, flyers, etc. These
are the people who send their stuff off to a Linotronics for printing (1200
dpi).
PS Having used FullWrite Professional for some time, there are some very
nice things there that I haven't seen in ANY other word processing/page
layout program, anywhere (Suns, Apollos, etc.) and which really show
up FrameMaker and InterLeaf.
PPS One question: why hasn't Apple's legal pit bulls gone after FrameMaker
for "user interface infringement" or whatever? Not that I approve of
the policy, but FrameMaker uses a LOT of Apple conventions, right down
to the little dialog boxes with the word ballons with "!" and "*" in
them? And I thought Sun and Apple weren't getting along...
"On the other hand, it takes real moral fiber to
remain a Republican when there's no money in it.
And things *are* looking grim on the financial
front. Even worse for the President, they're
getting confusing."
-- A. Whitney Brown
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
INTERNET: moriarty@tc.fluke.COM
Manual UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, allegra, hplsla, lbl-csam}!fluke!moriarty
CREDO: You gotta be Cruel to be Kind...
<*> DISCLAIMER: Do what you want with me, but leave my employers alone! <*>roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (02/24/88)
Last summer we got the FrameMaker demo tape. I was pretty
impressed with what it could do, but had a few major gripes. We were
running it on diskless 3/50's and it took a full 2 minutes to start up;
printing out various little messages about how it was reading fonts, etc.
Does anybody know if newer versions are any faster? It also ate up most of
the available memory, making it kind of hard to get anything else done.
One nice feature of FrameMaker was that if you didn't have a
license for a particular workstation, you could still run maker in
read-only mode.
--
Roy Smith, {allegra,cmcl2,philabs}!phri!roy
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016chuq@plaid.Sun.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) (02/25/88)
> Last summer we got the FrameMaker demo tape. I was pretty >impressed with what it could do, but had a few major gripes. We were >running it on diskless 3/50's and it took a full 2 minutes to start up; >printing out various little messages about how it was reading fonts, etc. >Does anybody know if newer versions are any faster? Newer versions are significantly faster than the demo. Chuq Von Rospach chuq@sun.COM Delphi: CHUQ There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in their home. Ken Olson, President, Digital Equiptment, 1977