Welcome to jump in

I’m very interested in that discussion you mentioned, would you give me a link?

I think the numbering issues with Word you mentioned will be solved with this Writing Outliner software, since each time you combine an output with Writing Outliner the numbering will be re-generated base on the structure of the writing project.

Regarding the ‘master pages’ features in FrameMaker, it seems that it’s something like page style templates which can be applied separately to each page?

And I’m very interested in technical writing, it seems that Writing Outliner can serve this purpose very well.

This is an Interesting question, and one that has plagued technical writers for years. Case in point, a recent discussion on the LinkedIn Technical Writers Group was as follows…”Is Framemaker more efficient than Microsoft Word?” There are currently 60 comments, and it grows daily. The general consensus is not to use Word for long documents such as technical manuals.

I use Microsoft Word 2007 every day in my business, but when writing a technical manual, I use FrameMaker. (However, I am in the process of switching from FM to Madcap Flare for single sourcing projects.)

My only complaints with FrameMaker and Madcap Flare are the cost and the learning curve.

As a technical writer, my complaints with using Microsoft Word for a book project are numerous. The two biggest issues are not having Master pages and the numbering issues. I’m not talking about the Word version of a Master page; I need the FrameMaker version of a Master page, which is the same as Quark or other DTP software. Numbering is and has been a huge problem in Microsoft Word. Yes, there are workarounds, but I find they are too difficult and time consuming for the average user.

I need numbering streams….pages, chapters, sections, tables, figures, etc. And I don’t want them to break if I insert a few paragraphs into my document! For example, try numbering a legal document in Word, then reordering a few paragraphs.

If anyone can fix the two issues with an add-in, you will have a gem on your hands!

I am very interested in beta testing your product.

Chapter 1

——————
——————
——————

***

——————
——————
——————

***
——————
——————
——————

It’s the way novels tend to be formatted. A chapter can be made up of a number of scenes, and the scenes are separated by a symbol (usually three asterisks). The marker occurs before the start of the next scene, which is why the last scene in a chapter won’t have a marker at the end.

Chapter

As for versioning, I think each ‘save a snapshot’ operation should be project level (without saving unnecessary, duplicated data), but also allow re retrieval of older versions for individual documents.

As for global search and replace, I agree with you that it’s must.

But I don’t quite follow you on the asterisks thingy, why 3 asterisks are needed to indicate the end of a scene, and aren’t needed for the last document in a chapter?

Thank you.

The only problem you would have is how to tell the add-in that no asterisks are required if it is the last document in a chapter.

‘draft1′ –> chapter 1 version 2, chapter 2 version 3′

‘draft2′ –> chapter 1 version 3, chapter 2 version 1, chapter 3 version 4

But when I thought about it, I reckon this would be quite hard to code up.

If you think about it though, a change in one document (a character name for example) will most probably lead to a change in other documents too. In this case, I’d rather save a new version of the entire project rather than save all the documents with the name change.

So if you can do both, then do both. Otherwise, save the version at the project level.

Hope that helps …

As for save and retrieve versions of the document, actually I have a question myself to this feature, i.e. I’m not sure if you writers prefer to save different versions of the whole project or save different versions of the individual documents (eg. chapters) separately? For example, if you are writing a book, do you want to save and retrieve ‘book version 1, 2, 3..’, or save/retrieve ‘chapter B version 1, 2, 3…’ and ‘chapter B version 1, 2, 3…’ individually?

While I’m here though, it would be nice if you could save and retrieve different versions of the same document.