Lesson 8: The Tools of the Trade
What FrameMaker offers that Word doesn't
FrameMaker is designed from start to finish as a tool for creating books. It understands the book as an object and that every book contains a subset of lesser elements like a table of contents, chapters, an index, sections, illustrations, and others. It gives you the control to organize your book in a sensible order, adding and reordering files at will, without the need to figure out which order to place files each time you work with the book.
FrameMaker has the concept of a cross reference, sort of like a hyperlink, that lets you pull chapter and page citations (or even paragraphs or sentences) from one place in the book and reference or include them in another. These cross references are then automatically maintained - if the original text changes its location or content the appropriate changes are automatically made in all references.
One of the main advantages to FrameMaker is the level of control it gives you over the appearance of your book. I mentioned above that one Microsoft Word files end up looking pretty much the same as all other Word files. With FrameMaker you can control exact layout of every type of page element. You basically start with a blank page and can determine exactly how your book will look from there.
In actuality most Frame users do not ever see that blank page - someone has already made all of the difficult choices for them and created a template to make it easy to implement the desired look. Although Microsoft Word does have a concept of templates they are very basic. FrameMaker templates capture every nuance of appearance and available formatting making consistency much easier.
