[comp.text.desktop] Need Information on Document Preparation Facilities

bryan@uunet.UU.NET (Bryan J. Cardoza) (06/22/88)

Our company is an manufacturer of minicomputer systems with
our own ports of System V and BSD4.2/4.3, and PICK.  As you
would well expect, we produce and maintain a lot of
documentation.  Our documentation group are looking for a
long range solution for our text processing needs.

Currently, most of our UNIX and PICK documentation is
ditroff-based, while our hardware reference manuals and
marketing literature are Macintosh-based.  We need an
integrated solution.  Because this is a new problem for our
documentation staff, I hope that those of you who may have
experienced this will have information that you are willing
to share with them.

One option is to go to completely Unix-based document
preparation platform (such as one to several Sun
workstations).  Considering that method:

   1.   What is the "best" WYSIWYG page make-up program for
        Sun (or similar) workstations?

   2.   What type of software packages are available that
        could be used to generate high quality line drawings
        on the workstation?

  2a.   Could drawings generated by the package be imported
        into the page make-up program mentioned in #1?  (Ala
        CricketDraw files imported into an MS-Word document
        on a Macintosh.)

   3.   What types of high-quality printing devices would be
        supported in the environment as outlined above?
        Laser Printers (HP, Imagen, etc.)?  Typesetters
        (Linotronic, AutoLogic, etc.)?

It would be advantageous to integrate our existing Macintosh
II's, SE's and Plus's with our Unix/ditroff-based
environment.  The goal would be to allow the Unix machines
to share resources (printers and data) with the Macintosh
systems.  I've seen ads for TOPS, but I rarely find
marketing hype informative.

   4.   Is there a realistic way for our existing Sun
        workstation (and via Ethernet our other Unix
        workstations) to share data and printing resources
        with the Macintosh systems in a PostScript
        environment?

Finally, I would like your candid opinion.

   5.   If you could create your "dream" document
        preparation system CONSIDERING THAT YOU HAVE TO WORK
        WITH A LOT OF EXISTING DITROFF-BASED DOCUMENTS, what
        would you specify?

Thanks for you help.

-- 
Bryan

bryan@iconsys.UUCP
{uunet,caeco,nrc-ut,rumiko}!iconsys!bryan

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