Looking for Advice re. Interleaf vs. FrameMaker

[Anthony A. Datri]

>material.  The publishing system will be used on diskful, monochrome
>SparcStation1+ workstations with plenty of memory, running X11.4.

If Interleaf runs at all under X, it's news to me.  Frame's 2.1X is due to
be released RSN; betas are out.  They'll give you a 1.3X for now if you
push, although it's flaky.

>make small use of Frame.  On the other hand, a key development partner of
>ours uses Interleaf, and it would be of great benefit to share machine
>readable publications with them.

Hah -- sounds like Stepstone.  My predecessor there bought Interleaf, and
I had no end of problems with it.  Interleaf licensing (at least then) is
by *hostid*, and expensive.  I had lots of problems getting Interleaf to
stay running.  Interleaf creates a "desktop" directory under ~ for each
user, and goes apeshit if this directory gets confused, which happens
often.  Frame puts your files wherever you want them, without obfuscation.
Frame also has reasonable PostScript support -- Interleaf doesn't.  Frame
licensing is done via RPC -- you have a number of licenses, which anyone
can use (you can also reserve some for specific users/machines if you
ike).  Interleaf printing is an unbelievable nightmare, as is the
installation process.  Printing with Frame is *easy* -- everything goings
through an FMlpr script, which you can easily tailor to use lpr (or
whatever) appropriately for each printer.

>in a mixed FrameMaker/Interleaf environment?  Is document exchange between
>the systems possible?  Reasonable?

I think Frame gives you an Interleaf input filter, but I'm not sure.

>Please send me e-mail directly; I'd be glad to post a summary to the net
>if there's interest.  Also, is there by any chance a better newsgroup on
>which I should have posted this message?

comp.text, which no-one reads:-)