Students who are looking at starting a career in technical writing post-college will do well to learn Adobe FrameMaker while they’re in school. While there are many desktop publishing programs out there, FrameMaker has endured as the preferred tool for producing long, technical documents across many industries.
Why FrameMaker?
FrameMaker produces excellent print and PDF output for all sorts of long technical documents like user manuals, troubleshooting guides and reference books. Throughout the document creation, it handles automatic numbering and organization for pages, chapters, paragraphs, captions and multiple other individual components. This allows for creating cross-references, indexes and table of contents, as well as individual styles and variables throughout the entire document.
It also has templates features that let you create multiple templates that you can assign individually to different pages in the same document, making it ideal for managing layouts. Other notable features include a flexible table editor and XML rendering, letting writers turn their content into material that’s easily ported to different publishing formats. Add to those the numerous plug-ins available and the custom coding facility (if you’re into that), giving users a whole lot of ways to personalize the way it works for them.
What’s the catch? FrameMaker is harder to use than Word, requiring a more systematic approach to document creation. Suffice to say, it will take time and commitment if you want to get your head around its multiple features. It’s also expensive. Even with student discounts, you’re likely to spend a couple hundred dollars in order to get a copy.