[thelist] Practices: -- What tools are best for Technical Document Creation

[Bryce Johnson]

Hey everyone

I've been asked to look into purchasing tools to help us assemble technical
documents.
Right now we write the content in Word, Charts in Excel, Drawings in
Illustrator or Visio and then when they need to be assembled into the final
document we make PDFs of everything and then assemble a document in Acrobat
Exchange.

The nice thing about this is that we don't have to worry to much about
whether our Illustrator artwork will import properly into word or other file
format issues, and different pages sizes and orientations are not a problem.
The bad thing is that when the last minute changes come we are trying to
edit text in Acrobat and that is not pretty.

So I need to setup a process and a toolset for assembling technical
documents.  At first I thought about Pagemaker because I already know how to
use it and I've heard can handle Office 2K. Some of the more experienced
document makers are telling me to go with Framemaker.

I would appreciate any insight into these tools or any other ones.

thanks
bryce