Re: Using Word for drafts?

["Deborah Snavely" <dsnavely@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rachel's summation of the obstacles to using Word for ROUND-TRIP drafts in
Word was cogent.

My experience is that authors contributing chunks in Word to a first draft
is fine with a few careful points for the Framers who assemble them into
books:
*  Never import a Word doc into a Frame doc! Open the Word doc from Frame
    if you need, and then copy and paste content into a clean Frame template
    and re-tag EVERYthing. Or save a text-only version of the Word doc and
    ditto.
*  If you need to send files for comment/review/edit, create PDFs from
    Frame and send them. Yes, your editors will need Acrobat
    (Exchange), not just Reader, to comment electronically, but it's worth
    it, especially if you have serial reviews--it's nice to let "you and him
    fight" in the Acrobat annotations, instead of the writer/editor having
    to mediate.
*  If the draft authors want final formatting control, they are in the wrong
    profession. Cogent comments about table formatting relative to data
    presentation is useful, but 30 tech reviewers  telling you that you
    forgot to italicize the title of book X (and ignoring gross errors of
    fact) are not.

Word to Frame table conversion is pretty decent but NOT an easy round-trip.

Deborah Snavely
at loose ends

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