Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucsd!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!maverick.ksu.ksu.edu!unmvax!uokmax!d.cs.okstate.edu!drd!mark From: mark@DRD.Com (Mark Lawrence) Newsgroups: comp.text.desktop Subject: Re: Any good WYSIWIG desktop publishing software on UNIX Message-ID: <1990Jul12.125922.22444@DRD.Com> Date: 12 Jul 90 12:59:22 GMT Sender: mark@drd.Com Reply-To: davis@garlic.IntelliCorp.COM (Nils Davis) Organization: DRD Corporation, Tulsa, OK Lines: 97 Chuck Musciano writes (about Frame and Interleaf): >It [Frame] has, hands down, the best mathematical WYSIWYG typesetter in the business. The integrated editor and spelling checker are much better than InterLeaf, and the search and replace function is unparalleled (you can do things like search for a particular font usage, and replace with anything, including a graphical object). The InterLeaf interface is, in the opinion of many, just terrible. EVERYTHING is in a menu, and the menu contents change based upon mouse position and document state. While InterLeaf has some fancy name for this and claims that it is better, recent studies (see SIGCHI, April, 1989) have shown this to be a less effective interface, producing greater cognitive loading upon the user. There are few, if any, keyboard accelerators. Brian Diehm responds, defending Interleaf: This is a really interesting area. Interleaf does appear less friendly at first. However, after you have used both for a while, Frame's friendliness seems to be all "on the surface." It's as if Interleaf has studied how professional typographers use the tools, and Frame has studied how desktop publishers think they want to use the tools. The difference is important in as little as an hour. Certainly, Frame does feel more comfortable, more "Macintosh-like" at first. And golly gee, it really does let you search for a Helvetica lower-case "f" if it is underlined and shadowed. But that's NOT the sort of things you need to DO in a manuals department with deadlines to meet. My two cents: If you are writing a manual that has structured font changes (e.g., all "language elements" are in Courier) you will be happier with Frame, because you can bind the keystrokes that change a word to your "language element" format to a single keystroke. In Interleaf, each time you want to make this change you have to select the word, then follow at least four, sometimes five or six, walking menus to change the format. In my manuals department, we are none of us looking forward to the process of converting our manuals to production form because among other things we will have to be formatting our "language elements." Don't think we could have saved time by converting at type-in time; to specify that "the next text" is in a new format, you still have to follow four or five menus. As another example, our product name changed in the middle of our manual production. We'd really like to write our product name in big and small caps. However, since we can't do a search and replace on anything but text, we will be using upper and lowercase instead. Perhaps we should have put our original product name into an "inline-component" in the first place -- we didn't, and now we can't do what we want. If we had been using FrameMaker, we could search for our product name and replace it with anything we wanted. If we were using Frame, and for some reason could not replace with such a trickily formatted piece of text, at least we could make a macro, changing a six-step process to a one-step process. IMHO, FrameMaker has the advantage because it offers flexibility like this. Another example -- Frame can send its print output to a file, while Interleaf can't. Say you want to print your manual on 7" x 9" pages, with 10 pt type. However, you can't read 10 pt type on your screen (neither Frame nor Interleaf shows 10 pt type well on screen). So, you make your document 20% bigger, thinking to shrink it down during printing. In Frame you can specify at print time that you want your file to be printed at 83% of its size --> 10 pt type. In interleaf, you can't. In addition, if you then want to send your PostScript output to a typesetter, you tell Frame to print to a file that you then put on tape and send to the service bureau. In interleaf, you can't get hold of this PS file -- a daemon takes over the whole process of printing to Ileaf's intefmediate file, converting it to PS, then sending it to the printer. Of course, I didn't mention that if you want to define your page size to be 7"x9" in Frame, with 10 pt type, you can always zoom your screen to 120% of true size for editing purposes. No chance of doing this in Interleaf. This should not turn into a feature battle between Interleaf and Frame; however, I wanted to mention that certain of us who are in the process of producing manuals with Interleaf miss features and flexibility we used constantly in Frame. Brian goes on to mention Interleaf's strength's, Effectivity and CALS support. I would personally add tables, which I think is the one BIG lack in FrameMaker. Effectivity is a big win, I'm sure -- I haven't figured out how to use it yet, though. Since our product is meant to be completely compatible across platforms, perhaps I won't need to. Interleaf's tables are completely good and a pleasure to use, compared to anything else I've used -- from tbl to Lotus 1-2-3 to WordPerfect to Frame. Nils Intellicorp Mountain View, CA ndavis@intelllicorp.com 415/965-5616 -- mark@DRD.Com uunet!apctrc!drd!mark$B!J%^!<%/!!!&%m!<%l%s%9!K(B "...do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly..." Micah 6:8