Is FrameMaker suitable for books ?

[Guest]

I need to create pdf books organised in the following way:

A front page, a TOC, a text part from a word .doc document, several (10-50) pdf files of 1-100 pages each. The pdf are or electronically generated or from scanning and for legal requirement should not be edited.  The word document should be edited until the very last minute and should contain hyperlink to the pdf files. The TOC as well should be fully hyperlinked.

Is Framemaker (or Robohelp or InDesign) the suitable software?

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

FM is definitely the way to go to create great looking PDFs with long documents, ToCs, cross-refs, etc. But it kind of sounds like you're authoring in Word already - you could do all this in Word working with Adobe Acrobat.

[Matt S - Tech Comm Tools]

I agree with Jeff...what's the reason you don't want to produce PDF from your (required) Word doc?

You can combine everything in Acrobat, then insert the Word doc pages at the last minute, along with any needed bookmarks.

-Matt

@mattrsullivan

[Art_Campbell1]

FrameMaker was designed from the ground up as a book publishing tool and has a number of unique features that make book creation easier, quicker, and often cheaper than using other packages. So the answer to your question is an unqualified "Yes."

One point in your produce wish list doesn't make any kind of sense though, and that's the workflow requirement for the PDFs. If you're creating the PDF from FrameMaker, you're certainly creating it "electronically." And you can protect any PDF from editing... so it shouldn't make any difference how they're created; direct electronic output, printed and scanned, or almost any other route will result in a PDF file that is equally well protected from alteration.

[Guest]

Thanks to all.

Presently we generate a pdf from the word text and we use combine in Acrobat to merge everything. The big issue is the TOC that actually is automatically created for the text part by Word itself but we have to add manually the pages for the all the tables and appendices (pdf files).

Actually, first we combine the almost final version of the text and all the pdfs with Acrobat and we add a total page numbering. Then we go back to the word file and we manually complete the TOC considering the actual pages that should be each pdf files. Even a change in the format of the text part can add a page with the consequent shift of all the page numbers of the following pdfs. The procedure is very time consuming and easily may generate errors.

Our final product should be a paper copy and a pdf file fully hyperlinked.

[Harry28586]

I think Framemaker is what you want,it can import the .doc files and generate a pdf out of it and create the TOC on the basis of headings or as per your requirement and you can generate TOC separately,and,if you work with robohelp,it also can perform the same functions however it cannot create the book.

If you have the Technical Communication Suite 3.5 ,you have Robohelp 9 and Framemaker 10 in it and you can perform the functions and Robohelp and Framemaker and combine them to get one single output as a PDF or html or other output formats as per your need along with all the cross-references,TOC,conditional text and other features both of Robohelp and Framemaker.

You can download the trial version of Technical Communication  Suite from www.adobe.com and try it out and let me know if you have any other questons.