"you dare to tell me who to be / who died and made you king of anything?"

[larryhammer]

We interrupt our regularly schedule piffle for a momentary howl.

In RoboHelp HTML, if you de-italicize text in an <i> tag, the result is <i style="font-style: normal;">.

o_O

WHY, ADOBE, WHY???

---L.

Comments

[rhinemouse.livejournal.com]

AGH. I just died a little inside.

[larryhammer]

This is the same application with a code-tidier that turns &ldquo; into &rdquo;r; (an actual bug rather than, yanno, intentional -- but still).

---L.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

RoboHelp still exists?

(I remember it as that thing some other people have to use from when I was using Interleaf 5, circa 1996-98. No doubt they felt the same about my group's ileaf use.)

[larryhammer]

Yup -- Adobe bought it with the rest of Macromedia, and has even been actively developing new releases. Breaking things as they do so ...

(We're mostly a FrameMaker + WebWorks shop, but we've one-offs like this recently acquired product that require us to keep a couple copies of RH around.)

---L.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

Heh, a bit like Corel's acquisition of WordPerfect--though their recent releases add almost nothing (still no Unicode support, despite claims!). Then again, things aren't noticeably broken, which follows from their not doing much actual development. Just releases.

My then-group was to switch to Frame+SGML right when I left for grad school, so before I left, I participated in some transitional testing to support the affiliated translation folks (who weren't using Interleaf and weren't going to use Frame, either). I think they switched over to vanilla FrameMaker about four years later. Somewhere I have a bunch now nearly unreadable .fm files of grad essays, made as part of an elaborate excuse to teach myself to use the app. It's not bad, but InDesign (despite its own flaws) seems cleaner, to me.

[larryhammer]

When Adobe rewrote much of the user interface to match the style of recent versions of Photoshop, they cleaned up some of the fussier bits of the user interface. While adding other fussinesses, of course, but once you get your pods docked where you want them, Frame's easier to use than it was before.

I've only really barely touched InDesign, and that was a while ago and I've never had opportunity, or really reason, to spend more time with it.

---L.

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

The docking feature is handy, yes. I stopped using Frame for personal work because I realized I didn't need the stuff that set it aside from WordPerfect, then OpenOffice. And then I laid out two books in OpenOffice/LibreOffice, which was a bit of a pain but not much more of one than doing it in Frame would've been, I think. Next book is in InDesign, however!

catching up after vacation

[larryhammer]

For the self-published book, I used Frame and was very glad of it. I used to use Frame for personal writing, but have been slowly switching over to an ASCII editor, which I was already using for HTML coding anyway.

---L.

Re: catching up after vacation

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

*nods* And I've just found the 1999 self-pub "book"--more of a booklet--that I did for self and a few colleagues following a conference we organized early in grad school. Heh. It was done in Frame. Having just converted its pieces to PDF (RTF doesn't suffice because there are footnotes, and apps claiming RTF support don't treat those the same way), I can see that Frame then and InDesign now handle books in similar ways. There's stuff that InDesign does in addition, from its Pagemaker inheritance, but InDesign seems to me like a partial Frame fork that hasn't replaced it yet due to Frame's industry-specific features, like DITA. (And it's really just as well that InDesign doesn't try to handle all of those features. Complex enough as it is, and slow enough to load.)

I think I don't do personal writing in the way you mean it; my research notes (similar?) tend to come with footnotes, either a few of my own or mimetic ones for the few times I type out chunks of someone's book/article, and it seems easier to use a footnoting feature than to develop something comparable inline that doesn't use parentheses, square or angle brackets, braces, or slashes. I use a plain text editor for some things, too, though.

Re: catching up after vacation

[larryhammer]

Foot/endnotes, yeah -- you want something that natively handles that.

---L.