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From: larrym@sail.LABS.TEK.COM (Larry Morandi)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Book Format question?  What to use?
Keywords: PageMaker, Word, Nisus, DTP, Word Processing
Message-ID: <8521@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM>
Date: 1 Dec 90 01:51:06 GMT
Sender: news@tekgvs.LABS.TEK.COM
Reply-To: larrym@sail.LABS.TEK.COM (Larry Morandi)
Organization: Tektronix, Inc., Beaverton,  OR.
Lines: 77

We are trying to convert our product manual to something that we can do
entirely on the Mac (previous version was done with custom macros and
ditroff on Unix).  I've been looking mainly at PageMaker, Word, Nisus,
FullWrite, and a few other options, but they all seem to have major
problems with the format we used (and ideally would like to continue
using).  The items that seem to give problems are:

1.  Wide left margin that is used for headers of various sizes, which can
    wrap.  Something like what follows (of course it doesn't work very well
    without fonts and sizes...)
^^^^
    __________________________________________________________________________
    The 88200 Cache  The RP88 contains three cache and memory management units
    and Memory       (CMMUs). These units store recently used data or
    Management       instructions to speed up the execution of software.
    Units            
                     The RP88 uses two CMMMU chips for instruction storage,
                     and the third
                     ... more text ...

    The Cache        The cache can send any instruction
                     ... more text ...
^^^^
    Of course, the left column should be a different font, and the one just
    under a line is a major head and in a larger size than the next one.
    (A good example of this format is the Symantec Utilities for the Mac
    documentation for version 1.0, the violet & gray cover, they changed
    the layout for version 2.0.)

    I can lay this out in PageMaker, but I don't find any way to tie the
    two text blocks together so that if I add more text to the right column,
    the left column follows and stays lined up.  I can sort of do this with
    table stuff in Word, but that gets pretty kludgy.  FullWrite sidebars
    do this very well, but their sidebar location conflicts with their feature
    of space-before a paragraph (like to get half line spaces between
    paragraphs) since the sidebar is tied to the top of the paragraph before
    the space is inserted (why didn't they implement space-after instead?).

2.  I would prefer to number my pages with section and page, i.e., 7-23 or
    B-3 in the Appendices (yes, you can do this in most any WP), but I want
    that numbering to carry through to the Table of Contents and the Index.
    Neither PageMaker, Word, Nisus, nor FullWrite seem to allow this.

3.  I would like to include a List of Figures and a List of Tables after
    the Table of Contents, as well as autonumber the Figure and Tables.
    I can autonumber with FullWrite citations, but none of the other seem
    to do this well, and wanting more than one "Contents" type construct
    seems almost impossible in anthing else (unless you just do it by hand
    after you know what page anything is on).

4.  Ideally, the whole document (hundreds of pages, multiple chapters with
    illustrations and tables, contents entries and indexing) should be
    processed all at once to create the TOC and index so that we don't have
    to do too much by hand.  This is where FullWrite really falls apart.
    It does most everything, but just can't handle complicated documents
    longer than about 40 pages (maybe I should qualify that as "it won't
    handle my document when it gets longer than about 40 pages"), and it
    doesn't have any way of handling multiple files as a single document.
    Also, it should ideally carry font, style and size through to the TOC
    and index so that I don't have to do much hand tweaking after creating
    them.
    
A comment or two about this quest.  I did not design the format.  It was
designed by a good technical writer with a good eye for graphic layout and
has been used successfully on several manuals produced by Tek.  I haven't
had a chance to really examine Interleaf or FrameMaker or XPress or Ready
Set Go! yet.

Does anyone have enough experience with any of these programs (the ones I've
tried or the ones I haven't) to give me any clues to accomplish the above
tasks?
				    Thank you very much,
				    Larry Morandi

E-Mail:     larrym@sail.labs.tek.com          AppleLink:  AdvTech
US Mail:    Larry Morandi, Advance Technologies, Tektronix, Inc.
            Box 500  MS 50-380, Beaverton OR 97077