Adobe FrameMaker vs. Adobe InDesign!
Which of These Powerhouse Print Publishing Applications is Right for You?
You've been producing publications in Word for years, but are finding that your files are just getting too complicated and difficult to handle. You are ready to make the move to a professional page layout program and turn to Adobe Systems, the world leader in publications software. Adobe offers two programs specifically for publishing multi-page documentation: FrameMaker 8 and InDesign CS3. Which one do you choose?
The two programs share a number of features. For instance:
- Both allow you to design the page structure with master pages, including the ability to pull live data off the page to display chapter and section headings for quick reference
- Both programs support paragraph styles and character styles to make quick work of text formatting. If tables are prevalent in your publications, you'll be glad to know that both programs offer table styles to quickly and uniformly lay out your tables.
So how do you determine which program to purchase and use for your work?
InDesign excels at:
- Shorter, multi-story publications such as brochures, flyers, newsletters and magazines
- InDesign is chock-full of high-end typography controls such as automatic ligatures, tracking, kerning, glyphs, baseline shift, hanging punctuation, drop-caps, and more
- FrameMaker can produce multi-story pubs like InDesign, but creating this kind of document is it is very cumbersome in FrameMaker
FrameMaker excels at:
- Laying out long, multi-chapter publications
- With the strong and flexible numbering options, you can make quick work of table, figure and section numbering
- You can add cross-references, equations, conditional text (for multi-version documents), all sorts of hypertext links, and user variables (for ever-changing product names and numbers).
Adobe states that InDesign has "robust" long document support. It does have some of the features mentioned above, but in my opinion, it InDesign falls short for the really long, complex technical documents.
If you are a technical writer, working on product documentation, I'd steer you towards FrameMaker. For the rest of you, the wide and varied features of InDesign will probably be a better fit. Or do what I do, buy both and then you can chose the best fit for each individual job!
About the author: Barbara Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and was recently recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers world-wide for 2007. Barb will be your trainer for our virtual Adobe FrameMaker 8 and InDesign CS3 classes.
Any suggestions for a tool that converts FrameMaker documents to InDesign? The one from DTP tools has not been satisfactory. Thanks.
Posted by: Jay Fresno | September 23, 2008 at 09:58 PM