Summary of responses on desktop-publishing survey (l

[De Clarke x2630]

From:  De Clarke, Systems Manager, UCO/Lick Observatory, UCSC, CA

This is the summary of my unofficial survey about desktop-publishing
software for Suns.  There are three products under consideration:
FrameMaker, Publisher, and Interleaf (TPS).  I have excerpted the
responses anonymously into Con and Pro for each product.  The anonymity is
just to protect us all from being quoted in anyone's sales brochures...

The users are, as always, opinionated about their choice of product; there
is no consensus except that no one seems to be in love with Interleaf and
that Arbortext needs to work on their user interface.  There are about six
or seven users reflected here, some of whom were more verbose than others.
I have excerpted and re-ordered their comments freely, but have not edited
their content.  Enjoy!

Interleaf Con:

    "I've been evaluating both FrameMaker and Interleaf pretty heavily for
    the past couple of weeks.  Interleaf seems to do most everything that
    we could want (though sub and super-scripts are a real pain).  But
    Interleaf's user interface is hideous, not the least bit similar to
    the host window system as their ads would have you believe."

    "I agree that the lack of bibliography support in Interleaf's package
    is not encouraging. I have used Interleaf's software for about one
    year and I have since then (about 2 months ago) switched to the
    Arbortext Publisher package...

    "In general, I have found that Interleaf's package is primarily
    business oriented with vast capabilities for pie charts and bar graphs
    (that are utterly boring). It does not surprise me at all that they do
    not contain a bibliography capability. They appear to have very little
    'academic orientation.' I am interested in using a package to write
    journal and conference articles, and not year end business portfolios.
    I have found Interleaf's support of academia to be utterly appalling.
    They have *one* (very good) person in the main office and this is what
    Interleaf calls 'academic support.'

    "...you will find doing _everything_ WYSIWYG is a real pain and very
    slow! Commands (when you already know them) are fast! For users who
    know nothing about document processing, TPS is a good solution.
    However, for people who have already moved along the learning curve
    (for learning special document preparation commands), these people
    will not want to step back into the stone age and be constricted
    completely by hundreds of pop up menus...

    "Interleaf cannot come close to the output of the Publisher since the
    Publisher formats on a 'document' (or part thereof) level rather than
    on a real-time, 'line of text' level."

Interleaf Pro:

    "Interleaf is truly WYSIWYG - this is handy..."

    "In general, I have found that Interleaf's package is primarily
    business oriented with vast capabilities for pie charts and bar
    graphs..."

FrameMaker Con:

    "FM only has font sizes to 24 points and IL goes to 72...

    "I think FM is less than $1000 with the educational discount.  Though
    if you need the text or graphics filters for importing other formats
    of data you'll have to pay about $1000 for each of the two packages.
    They wouldn't let us evaluate the text or graphics filter packages.
    (Which instills confidence, of course.) Since they wouldn't let us try
    out their graphics filter pack without buying it I wrote a filter of
    my own...

    "When I imported a wave-form with about 1000 points I found that the
    data didn't look right.  It had funny artifacts in it. Turns out that
    FrameMakers internal representation has a precision of less than 100
    dots per inch!  I verified this with their tech- support.  Arrgh!  My
    printer does 300 dpi.  My figures look terrible when truncated to 100
    dpi.

    "What were they smoking when they wrote FrameMaker?! Tech support said
    that things would get better with the next release, but still not 300
    dpi. FrameMaker appears to be a very nice package if you don't take
    the graphics facilities too seriously."

    "I have not tried FrameMaker except in demo form and it did not seem
    very impressive..."

    "... Also I found FrameMaker to be very Macintosh like in its user
    interface.  While I don't mind that (and sort of like it) when it is
    on a Mac, I find that it conflicts with my use of the Sun.  Sort of
    like switching keyboards.  There is a big "context swap" my mind has
    to make."

FrameMaker Pro:

    "FrameMaker is much easier to learn and to use, and it does most of
    what Interleaf is capable of..."

    "With Frame, I did all sorts of things, multi-column documents, line
    art, different text flows, and never picked up the manual...  "Frame
    is true WYSIWYG, and has good response to even complex document
    modifications. I found the Frame interface intuitive, with a nice
    balance of menus for novices and keyboard commands for experts...

    "Frame is fully integrated, except for table of contents and index
    generation (which bothers me, but is outweighed by other features).  I
    can insert PostScript into my Frame documents (and do occasionally) to
    accomplish the few things that Frame cannot...

    "Frame is, I believe, $995/station at educational rates.  With the
    floating license server, you can actually get away with much less.
    For example, suppose, you have 15 stations, but actual use of Maker is
    about four simultaneous users.  Just buy four licenses, and share them
    among the 15 Suns.  The license server idea is one which needs to be
    picked up by other companies." [I agree completely! --dc]

    "... we have also been evaluating "real" desktop publishing systems
    for other purposes and were quite disappointed with the Publisher
    because it was painfully slow.  We have just purchased a Framemaker
    license partially because it blows the socks off the Publisher."

    "Framemaker runs about $2500 a seat for commercial entities (Sony
    bundles it free with their workstations).  It has a Network License
    Server so that it isn't restricted to any one machine on the net.  It
    has a very mac-like interface.  I like it, but then, it is the only
    one I've ever used (Interleaf looks stinky-poo in comparison)."

Publisher Con:

    "I found Publisher to be a backwards step from Frame... I sat down
    without the manual and tried to do something productive.  I got
    nowhere.  I couldn't figure out how to create a simple document.

    "Publisher is not a WYSIWYG package.  It is a compose/preview package.
    This is completely unacceptable in my book.  I find it annoying to
    continuously move back and forth between compose and preview windows
    to check my work.

    "The user interface is poor.  Commands which do one thing in the
    compose window do another in the preview window.  For example, I seem
    to recall that in compose, you used ^H, ^J, ^K, and ^L to move around
    (which is bad enough) but in preview you used B, F, P, and N
    (backwards, forwards, previous, and next).  I don't want to learn two
    tools in one... The drawing programs are separate tools. Again, I
    don't want to learn N tools, I want to learn one.     

    "Overall, Publisher seems targetted to people who know TeX.  Why do
    you want to hang on to old technology when all this wonderful new
    stuff is coming out?  Do you really care what the internal
    representation of your document is? What does it matter if it is TeX,
    PostScript, or C/A/T?"

    "I acknowledge the severe problems with the user interface, and the
    schizzy 'let's sort of glue five totally different tools together and
    call them a package' flavour of the whole thing.  I think the Draw and
    Paint menus are the worst interface I've seen in years;  as we said
    here when we first saw it, 'One word seems to be worth a thousand
    icons!'"

    "Basically it runs under suntools and provides you with an editor
    (rather too X11/uwm-y in character, like a Mac editor that
    mutated)..."

Publisher Pro:

    "Arbortext's package (The Publisher) is based on TEX and LATEX, so if
    you are used to these packages...it makes articles easy to prepare
    (BIBTEX, of course, is also included)... I finally learned that I
    wanted a package that supported commands in text (like LATEX), but
    also allowed me to format tables, equations, and pictures in a
    complete WYSIWYG style. The point is -- if you are a fairly
    sophisticated user of TEX or LATEX then you will still want to use
    these commands to edit documents...

    "With Version 2.1, The Publisher is much faster than earlier versions
    and previewing is fairly quick. A classic tradeoff in text processing
    -- do you want a) true wysiwyg with average document formatting, or b)
    partial wysiwyg (with a previewer) with great document formatting?

    "The Publisher comes with PubDraw and PubPaint - 2 extrememly flexible
    picture editing programs. [In PubDraw] one thing I like is the
    capability of putting arrows on the end of any curve (a line, a
    spline, an arc). One does not have to go into an 'arrow database
    (?!)'. In this sense, I have found PubDraw to contain highly
    orthogonal features. As far as a paint program, TPS contains a minimal
    capability compared with PubPaint. One more thing - you can run
    PubDraw and PubPaint standalone!! This is a handy feature which
    promotes a kind of 'toolkit' approach which I like.

    "... Arbortext's people seem to have their act together, and they
    respond as quickly as they can concerning problems... Arbortext also
    is on INTERNET!!! This means you can send them the stuff that might be
    causing problems (using FTP) and they can verify things."

    "One of the reasons I like Publisher is because it offers me an
    interactive, TeX-independent presentation interface, while retaining
    the benefits derived from using TeX--such as availability on a large
    number of systems and printing devices, use of a de facto standard
    allowing portability between authors, quality of output, and markup
    language capabilities.  Of course there are import/export facilities
    for those who use TeX, LaTeX, or SGML directly, but it does not
    diminish the capabilities of the software as a stand-alone text
    production tool if they are not used....

    "I will give into the temptation to include a (very abbreviated)
    Publisher features list: based on standards (TeX, SGML, and
    PostScript); great table and equation editors; TeX-quality output
    (`for the creation of beautiful documents'); multilevel `undo'
    facility; import/export of TeX, LaTeX, and SGML documents; tons of
    fonts (including complete math fonts); bibliography support; graphics
    editors, screen capture and scanner support, import facilities for Sun
    bitmaps, PostScript graphics, MacPaint, MacDraw and Excel graphics;
    and ASCII terminal support."

    "First let me say that we have Publisher.  I evaluated a copy of
    FrameMaker before we got Publisher and the following comments are
    based on what I remember from that process (it was over a year ago).

    "I believe that Publisher and FrameMaker are/were best suited for
    different tasks.  We got Publisher cause it seems better for
    "fixed"/repeatable style documents (i.e. books, manuscripts,
    thesis,...) which is/was our primary application.  It also has/had a
    better equation editor and a resonable table anf drawing/painting
    editors.  The other important feature is that it can produce TeX
    output so we can send the "raw" manuscript to others without them
    having to have a "very" esoteric piece of software (i.e. either
    Publisher or FrameMaker) to use it.  We have version 2.1 of Publisher
    which is able to convert to/from LaTeX documents.  Don't get me wrong,
    I still think there are problems with Publisher, but I think there is
    good progress on it."

    "We have been using ArborTex's LaTex implementation for preparing
    manuals, manuscripts, grant proposals, etc. and like it very much for
    preparing things that we want to have in TeX."

    "We've been using TeX under VAX/VMS for many years, and so this
    strikes us as real nifty keen.  It's reasonably fast even on a 3/50...
    The manual is excellent; for those who have suffered through and with
    Knuth's TeXBook for half a decade, it's a treat. ArborText's support
    team has been friendly and responsive (better than Sun hotline, these
    days) and they have a good edu discount -- it cost us about $900 per
    station.

    "We are TeX-based, and we typeset massive astrophysical books and
    journal articles.  Our main business is equation-setting, with tables
    and matrix manipulations that sometimes occupy multiple pages.  We
    write raw TeX;  there's just no other way.  We have to write macros to
    produce our own custom symbols, etc.  And we have to share our
    documents with collaborators around the world in human-readable form.
    So we need to be able to stuff foreign TeX source into Publisher, and
    to get TeX source out of it on occasion.  Although they are fun and a
    great sales gimmick, our need for Draw and Paint is minimal;  all our
    illustrations are either produced by large scientific graphics
    packages or by dedicated CAD system, saved as PS files, and inserted
    into documents ex post facto.

    "What Publisher did for us was to make it easy to continue our
    seven-year TeX tradition with its accumulated expertise, but make
    trivial tasks like letters and memos very easy and fast (raw TeX is
    cumbersome and not worth it for the little stuff). And we do, in fact,
    like to know and hack the innards of our typesetting software..."