As a follow-up to yesterday's question from an ex-FrameMaker user, William Adams posted the following response to Hans's response: ---------------- Begin Forwarded Message ---------------- Subject: Re: [OS X TeX] Can Tex do That? From: "William F. Adams" Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 11:15:07 -0500 I've been very busy at work lately (but finally finding (some) time to work on TUG2003 and my paper ;) The answers received here and on TeXHaX are quite good though, so I didn't feel (too) guilty about not answering. Did want to comment on this: On Monday, February 9, 2004, at 10:41 AM, Adam Lindsay quoted Hans Hagen saying:

- i still have to find something that cannot be done in tex (apart from page by page made up documents but that's a different game anyway)

Actually, when automated layout styles break down here or simply won't raise up to the customer's quality expectation here at work, doing such on a case-by-case, page-by-page basis is the raison-detre (sorry, not sure 'bout the funny French accents ;) for my employment here. Doing such manually / by hand in TeX is the first line of defence and is usually where things are held at (picking spreads to run long / short is a good example as is forcing float placement), but at need we'll fall back on tweaking things w/ Enfocus PitStop or (re)creating a section in FreeHand or Illustrator. This is usually done in the final moments of a project when time is tight and there's no payoff for doing things programmatically (most of our books are one-offs and the designer was _not_ paid extra for series use) A question I've not seen asked is, did you trouble to tag your documents w/ SGML? If so, you're a good ways toward re-use / switching to a formatting engine like TeX. If not, what's your budget? My suggestion would be to set up LaTeX documentclass packages for all the documents which you create, then use LyX for editing all of your text source (and rtf2latex to pull in Word .docs from the un-washed masses), w/ a .layout file for LyX which calls your documentclasses, things should, ``just work'' at that point except for the odd special case which will require manual tweaking (can be done as ERT (evil red text --- raw LaTeX code) inserted into the text). There was a very nice presentation at TUG2003 on doing this sort of switch, but the company bought the code and it wasn't released. Can't resist pointing out though that John Warnock swore up and down that for so long as he was in charge at Adobe after their purchase of Frame Corp. Adobe would do FrameMaker (nominally he's not in charge of day-to-day operations these days). William -- William Adams, publishing specialist voice - 717-731-6707 | Fax - 717-731-6708 www.atlis.com ----------------- End Forwarded Message -----------------