Gary Schnabl, who resides in Southwest Detroit, is a freelance technical editor and writer. He uses primarily the Adobe FrameMaker and InDesign, Microsoft Office Professional 2007, and OpenOffice.org (OOo) software suites and is a technical editor for the OOoAuthors documentation project that creates and maintains the user guides for OOo.

In addition to technical writing and editing, this weblog deals with the allied topics of copyeditng, proofreading, layout editing, and indexing. Although working with OOo is preferable, whenever possible, due to its ease-of-use and flexibility, there are a number of writing functions that OOo does not perform satisfactorily, such as reliable cross references across files and its inability to do run-in subheads, among others.

Fortunately, it is possible to create documents with OOo and convert them to MS Word with some facility, as long as any incompatible conversions to or from MS Word and OOo Writer are avoided. Once an OOo Writer ODT file is converted into a stable MS Word DOC file, it is a straightforward process to further convert the resultant DOC file into a conventional FrameMaker file. And if desired, when using a conversion table, the conventional FrameMaker file can be further converted into an Adobe Structured (XML) FrameMaker FM file whenever any structured “heavy lifting” is required for lengthy documents, such as books.

However, MS Word or OOo Writer work just fine for typical general documentation, and using FrameMaker is, therefore, not often required. For example, FrameMaker is rather clunky when it comes to tables, so for that functionality (and others) the former two software suites are actually better than FrameMaker. So, this weblog will point out any cases where one or another DTP application falls down (or excels) on any task, while discovering any such shortcomings that occur from time to time.