Publisher vs. FrameMaker

[Hilarie K. Orman]

The discussion about these excellent products for Sun workstations has
brought out some good points.  I tried both of them last year, liked them
both, and chose Publisher.  One of the reasons is that it is NOT purely
WYSIWYG. 

I have often found WYSIWYG distressing because it obscures the semantics
of the document structure.  It is sometimes the case that what you see on
the screen looks OK, but it is wrong at printer resolutions, or it is
wrong when modified slightly.  This can result from having text in the
wrong environment (paragraph instead of list, indented paragraph instead
of block paragraph, etc.).  With the Publisher, I can see the structure
with explicit names and markers on one side of the screen, and I can
preview it WYSIWYG on the other side.  This saves me "debugging" time.

Another benefit of this is that I can edit the document in a larger point
size than will be actually used on the printed page.  B&W screen
resolution is still not good enough to make 10 point type easily readable,
and this indicates to me that literal WYSIWYG is impossible today.

As far as I know, the Publisher is the only system with good (any?)
bibliography support, and this is precisely because it uses TeX's very
well developed cabilities for accessing bibliographic databases.

Last year ArborText was the only company I knew of with "floating"
licenses.  Frame has shown good sense in picking up that idea.

One thing we found in the time we spent evaluating various WYSIWYG
products was that they do put strain on 3/50's.  Initially we blamed the
vendors for "flakey" software, but later we found that we were running out
of swap space, process slots, and text entries.  Beefing up the
configurations removed most of the problems, except for the generic one of
things being a little bit slower than one would like.

There are lots of grounds for comparing these products, but some things
that are clear are that tastes vary a lot, no one likes learning to use
something new, and no one likes spending money on software.

Hilarie Orman
Trusted Information Systems, Inc.
Los Angeles CA
(ho at la.tis.com, ...!trwrb!aero!trusted!ho)