Microsoft Word vs. Adobe FrameMaker: A Detailed Comparison

This article compares Microsoft Word and Adobe FrameMaker by examining the following key areas:

• Ability to create Long Documents
• Short Documents
• Using Microsoft Word as a DTP Tool
• Printing and Typography
• Cross-platform capabilities
• Word’s Strengths and Weaknesses
• Importing Graphics
• Indexing and Cross-Referencing

Over the past decade, Adobe has created a suite of publications software, with FrameMaker fulfilling the role for documentation generation. Adobe has stated that development plans for the immediate future include enhancing the import and export of files from one format to another.

Companies that choose FrameMaker are safe-guarded regardless of future documentation standards, such as XML, SGML, Acrobat, or HTML.

Long Documents

Microsoft Word’s Weaknesses

• Word doesn’t handle large documents well and begins to have difficulties when it goes over 100 pages of standard text, especially with a combination of graphic and text formatting.
• Compiling the Table of Contents (TOC) and indexes for multiple files takes much longer in Word than in FrameMaker.
• Microsoft Word is not a desktop publishing program — it’s a word processor.

Adobe FrameMaker’s Strengths

• Ideal for large books (i.e., 200 pages and more).
• It relies on pre-defined templates. Using templates in Word is far from ideal as they tend to corrupt under stress (e.g., too many bullet lists and graphic imports), which can generate errors like inserting paragraph marks in headers and footers.
• The real advantage to FrameMaker is the ease at which documentation, indices, and cross-references can be updated.
• Page, section, figure, table, and even equation numbering can follow any scheme you can think up.
• FrameMaker is designed specifically for long, complex documents, which can be edited, updated, and changed—including the TOC and indexes—very easily.

Adobe FrameMaker’s Weaknesses

• Expensive.
• Steep learning curve.
• Possibly being phased out by Adobe and replaced by InDesign.

Note: FrameMaker is best on 1280 x 1024 monitors and can be difficult to use on small screens.

Short Documents

If your documents are under 100 pages on average, FrameMaker is probably not required. Also, the word processing functions in FrameMaker (i.e., spellcheck, redo, undo, sort) are not as robust as Word’s.

Using Word as a DTP Tool

Word was not designed as a Desktop Publishing (DTP) program — it’s a word processing program that has added features over releases, so it can be used for less intensive publishing requirements. To be more specific:

• It does not handle any color separations.
• It has poor support for page layout and/or graphic placement (e.g., you can’t rotate graphics).
• It is not designed as a structured document tool for cross-referencing other books. The Master Document feature is meant to address this but is notorious for collapsing.

Printing

FrameMaker is excellent for producing printed manuals. Very little deterioration occurs when printing complex documents across a range of printers and operating systems. It is more connected to the publishing world and has very close ties to Adobe’s other technologies, such as the Adobe Type Manager, Postscript, and Acrobat PDF.

If you have to print large documents in Word, you’ll most likely end up having to split the document into smaller files, changing the headers and footers accordingly, hard-coding the TOCs, and having nightmares with any cross-references. Avoid this at all costs!

Typography

FrameMaker’s quality of typography is better than most DTP packages and significantly superior to Word. FrameMaker is very useful for intensive printing jobs where, for example, you can utilize Postscript.

Cross-Platform Capabilities

FrameMaker’s cross-platform capabilities are very impressive. No other commercial DTP package runs across so many platforms. FrameMaker documents print identically on Unix, Mac, and Windows, provided you are using the same release version.

Microsoft Word’s Strengths

Word is not without merit and has some nice features:

• When you highlight a word, Word also highlights the next space, which improves cut & paste operations.
• The Insert Symbols dialog box is faster and more intuitive than FrameMaker’s Help KeyboardMaps mechanism.
• Word offers several views of a document, including a non-WYSIWYG view that works well on typical landscape monitors.
• Features like Autotext, Autocorrect, and the Macro Recorder are very helpful.

Microsoft Word’s Weaknesses

• Formatting diagrams and images is awkward and prone to crashing the system.
• Temporary Word files will eat up your disk space and sometimes don’t get deleted from the cache.
• You can’t have text on one page with different directions (e.g., horizontal headers and footers with a vertical picture description).

Importing Graphics

There is a distinct difference between how both programs handle graphics:

• FrameMaker imports graphics by reference. Graphics can be copied directly into the file or, preferably, referenced from another location. This method is recommended as the file size doesn’t bloat, and when you update a source graphic, it is automatically updated in the document.
• Word copies the file directly into the document. Therefore, when you change or update the source graphic, you need to import it back in again, re-size it, and adjust the layout.

Importing files into Word tends to increase the file size dramatically. We’ve seen files double from 2MB to 4MB and continue to double until they reached 64MB – with no additional graphics being added. When Word has difficulties, it tends to expand in size, which can result in being locked out of your document as your PC runs out of memory.

Indexing

Adobe FrameMaker

FrameMaker has very advanced indexing capabilities:

• You can index to several levels.
• You can provide different types of indexes and lists (e.g., an index of multiple chapters, where each chapter is a separate file).
• You can have lists of tables and figures that are compiled and formatted automatically.
• You can track imported graphics on a list and have the number of pages in each chapter, TOC, index, and glossary created automatically in another compiled index.

Microsoft Word

Microsoft has rudimentary indexing, but nothing near the capability of multiple indexing that FrameMaker has.

Cross-references

FrameMaker automatically cross-references document paragraphs, including those in multiple files. Cross-references can include text, paragraph numbering, figure titles, table titles, and numbers.

Microsoft Word does not have these advanced features.

Formatting

Adobe FrameMaker

FrameMaker again has very powerful features, such as:

• Formatting multiple paragraph number schemes within a single document.
• Creating bullets with any character type.
• Running headers and footers using referenced paragraphs (e.g., paragraph heads).
• Formatting tables using table templates, ensuring a consistent format for each type of table.

Microsoft Word

Word has a limited and mutually exclusive form of paragraph number schemes. The formatting is tied to the rest of the paragraphs, making it extremely difficult to format different fonts, styles, or sizes within the same numbering stream or to have multiple numbering streams. Word does not automatically number your tables or your figures.

Feature-Specific Comparisons

Templates

Creating templates in Word is fairly limited, as it’s essentially designed for writing letters. Also, you can’t open a Word template while other users are using a document based on that same template.

Pagination

Word tends to change pagination when you change the printer driver, even if the fonts have not changed, ruining indexes and tables of contents.

Endnotes & Footnotes

• Word supports true endnotes and long footnotes that can split across successive pages.
• FrameMaker does not support true endnotes or long footnotes. It has a workaround using cross-references, but this is cumbersome. If a footnote is too long to fit on its page, the entire footnote text is moved to the next available page.

OLE Support

FrameMaker doesn’t support OLE (Object Linking and Embedding).

SGML

With FrameMaker+SGML, you have the combination of FrameMaker’s features and the ability to create an SGML document that can be used with a database search engine.

Conclusion: The Future of Adobe FrameMaker

Adobe has assembled a collection of documentation software with FrameMaker central to that strategy. Adobe has stated that development plans for the immediate future include enhancing the import and export of files from one format to another.

Companies that choose FrameMaker are safe-guarded regardless of future documentation standards, such as XML, SGML, Acrobat, or HTML.

Template Downloads:

User Guide Templates

Technical Writing Templates

Release Notes Templates

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