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SCO director defends fight-back stance (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 26, 2004 16:42 UTC (Thu) by bfields (subscriber, #19510)
Parent article: SCO director defends fight-back stance (ComputerWorld)

Dumb question from someone who's never used FrameMaker: what does FrameMaker do that TeX (and related packages) don't?

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What does Framemaker do?

Posted Aug 26, 2004 17:40 UTC (Thu) by gilb (subscriber, #11728) [Link]

The short answer is that TeX can do anything Frame can do. However, it is easier to do it in Frame because of the GUI. Hacking TeX style files to get your look just right requires a lot of learning before you can get started. Frame allows you to get started more quickly.

Frame is used for publishing (IEEE standards are done in Frame) as it is far superior to MS Word or Wordperfect for this type of task.

I use Frame 6.0 (with Crossover Office) when I edit the draft standard because that is what the IEEE wants and because others in the group can also use it. I use TeX for my own documentation because its equation capabilities are unmatched.

What does Framemaker do?

Posted Aug 27, 2004 12:47 UTC (Fri) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link]

I don't agree. I've worked with Framemaker (maintaining a document when
the original writer was in hollidays), and things are not as easy as it
looks. I only wanted something that seems to be simple: add a table of
contents to the document. LaTeX: \tableofcontents, done. Framemaker: Find
out where to edit (or rather add) the table of contents style in the
hidden style frames, edit that, and then add the table of contents. Took
me a day or two, and still looked ugly. The reason was probably that the
author started with an incomplete template, because a document template
should contain a TOC style, anyway.

Just because it is WYSIWYG, it is not easy, if there is no
straight-forward way to do it (the way LaTeX does it is straightforward,
and the GUI frontend (LyX) makes inserting a nicely formatted TOC a matter
of two or three clicks).

Tailoring the TOC style to your needs is more elaborated in LaTeX than in
Framemaker (i.e. it takes more to know about, but the result looks so much
better in any case that it's comparing apples and oranges).

SCO director defends fight-back stance (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 26, 2004 18:41 UTC (Thu) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link]

I agree with gilb's response. If you're starting from scratch and are a gooey kind of guy, then FrameMaker has the advantage of a shorter learning curve. Relative to LaTeX, Frame has the disadvantage of inferior typesetting , restricted foramatting, and cumbersome mathematical expression handling.

LaTeX has a longer, steeper learning curve -- but if you are a programmer it is not hard to relate to. Also depends on one's motivation. Twenty years ago I was a grad student in mathematical physics at University of Utah. TeX had just become available on the Math Department's Vaxen. The departmental secretaries were tripping over themselves in their rush and desire to learn this typesetting language. These were secretaries, not programmers. And this was TeX, not LaTeX. And these were multiplexed character terminals, not video monitors. But these gals had spend their careers hoarding alternate golf-balls for their IBM Selectrics upon which they painstakingly prepared journal manuscripts for their math professorial clients. You bet they were motivated. A year later LaTeX was out and Nelson Beebe had written a nifty set of LaTeX mode macro's for Alice's Emacs. That was like heaven.

That was also twenty years ago, and people's standards and tolerance for pain have diminished. I learned LaTeX on that system, and prepared two dissertations and three articles for some fairly prestigious journals. The subsequent advent of dedicated individual workstations, video monitors, and Xdvi has made LaTeX just a joy to use -- for me. But I already have gone through the process of learning it. But by comparison FrameMaker just seems clumsy and slow.

Again, that is to my own perception. By "slow" I mean by how fast it takes *me* to input and format documents containing even a minimal amount of mathematical expression. Keep in mind that typesetting mathematical books, and typesetting beautiful mathematical books, was Knuth's motivation for developing TeX and its associated fonts in the first place. The result is unsurpassed. All the journals of the American Mathematical Society and American Physical Society except manuscripts as LaTeX files using journal-specific style sheets. If you mant to see the end result, browse the mathematics sections of your local technical bookstore and note how many authors have set their products using LaTeX, and the unsurpassed quality of their results.

Their are also good packages for incorporating figures and drawings into LaTeX markup files, but I haven't used them much myself.

But any of these systems takes time and research to learn to use well. Which to choose will also depend on your targeted applications and environment. I've spoken from the mathematics and physics perspective, at which LaTeX has no peer. But if you are looking for a skill applicable to a particular company or industry that has standardized on FrameMaker, well, LaTeX might not be such a good choice. As FrameMaker might not be so good if your targeted environment has already standardized on DocBook or SGML.

Plan ahead. One size does not fit all.

SCO director defends fight-back stance (ComputerWorld)

Posted Aug 27, 2004 15:10 UTC (Fri) by dvdeug (subscriber, #10998) [Link]

"Unsurpassed quality"? A lot of the pre-1900 math books were typeset with unsurpassed quality. I've always disliked looking at TeX output; I think the standard font is off, for one thing. But looking at modern math conference books, where each contributor typeset his own section, the TeX sections always beat the other sections.