在不深入讨论这一点的情况下，一个关键的区别是，发布软件倾向于将您视为同意的成年人，并且当您想要扩展或自动化事物时不会妨碍您。 可以使用文字处理软件来处理大型文档，但它有许多设计决策适合临时用户编写简短的文档，而很少考虑质量。 这些调整是以牺牲大规模文档准备工作的适应性为代价的。 我发现 Word for spec 文档的主要问题是较差的索引和交叉引用以及一般的不稳定问题，我总是不得不返回并修复问题。 然而，大多数环境中的政治考虑（我是一名承包商）意味着人们常常会坚持下去。
Technical Publishing Software - Views on FrameMaker and Its Alternatives
I've done spec documents with LaTeX and Framemaker, and designed a Framemaker workflow to support a team of 5 analysts producing a spec document for an insurance underwriting system. The document was expected to get to 2,000 pages or so. Many years ago (around 1992-1993) I also worked briefly as a typesetter.
Framemaker is designed for technical documentation and does it very well indeed. It also has features designed to support very large documents with multiple authors - people use this system to do documents with more than 100,000 pages. It is also more accessible than LaTeX to users familiar with word processing software.
Key features of Framemaker:
Documents consisting of multiple
files: You can pull together a
'Book' with multiple subsections in
different files. The document can
also be kept in source control.
Textual MIF format for
import/export: The importer is
somewhat finicky (I found generating
working LaTeX to be easier) but you can
generate items such as data
dictionaries and import them into
the document. The file has textual
anchors (see below) so you can
create cross-reference links that
will be stable across imports. I
find this to be a key feature for
specs as it allows cross-references
to link directly to generated items.
Powerful tagging, indexing and cross-referencing System: Everything
is based on tags in Framemaker and
it is easy to apply tags quickly.
This means that cross-referencing,
indexing, conditional text and
applying styles en-masse is easy and just works. You can generate indexes and TOCs based on tags, so
having multiple specialised indexes
(such as a list of data field names
from screens or a data dictionary)
is easy to do. The document I
described above had 4 separate
indexes.
Stable: Framemaker is designed for
professionals so it doesn't second
guess you in the way that word does.
It is also much more stable on large
documents. Anyone who's tried to
write a document of more than 50-100
pages on Word should have a pretty
fair idea of what this implies.
Scriptable: FM has a C API and there
are various scripting plugins
(FrameScript and FMPython
being probably the most widely used)
which can be used to automate jobs
in FM. Framemaker 10 adds support
for a Javascript based scripting tool
called Extendscript, presumably
ported across from the scripting facility
in InDesign.
Single-sourcing: From a single FM
document you can produce PDF,
Windows Help (CHM), HTML and print
documents fairly easily. The
cross-references also resolve to
hyperlinks.
Global style controls: You can
easily set up styles for a document
and apply it across the whole
document. It also facilitates
running headers and footers with a
great deal of flexibility in having
them track sections, versions,
chapters etc.
Alternatives to Framemaker
LaTeX/Lout: You've already indicated
that you don't want a markup
lanaguage, but the TeX and Lout systems are used for large
structured documents and do this
well.
Ventura Publisher: Probably the
only real alternative to Framemaker
if you want that sort of user interface
without paying bodily parts for the
privilege.
It has strong support for structured
documents and an XML-based document
interchange format. It's now owned
by Corel, who still appear to be actively promoting it.
There are a couple of other technical publishing tools on the market: Quicksilver (which used to be known as Interleaf) and ArborText. These two are powerful tools - Interleaf used to be the market leader in this field at one point - but quite expensive.
Adobe Indesign: Although Adobe
claim you can do large documents
with InDesign, the cross-referencing
and other large document features
tend to be viewed as lacking by
Framemaker afficionados. There is,
however, a text entry system for it
called InCopy that apparently
does have this sort of
functionality and quite
a large body of Third-party
plugins, some of which do
support tagging and other such facilities.
InDesign also has a scripting API and
a JavaScript interpreter for executing
scripts.
I haven't used Indesign,
so I can't really comment on how
well it works in practice.
DocBook: This is really just
a standard format for structured
documents but has a large ecosystem
of tools surrounding it for writing
and rendering documents. If you
don't want to use LaTeX you will
probably not want to use DocBook for
similar reasons. As Vinko Vrsalovic
points out (+1), This link goes to a StackOverflow
post from someone describing using
DocBook in practice.
I've never really used DocBook and I've
made so many edits to this post that it's now in Wiki mode, so
someone familiar with DocBook might
want to elaborate on this.
Word processing software:Word
has serious shortcomings as a
technical publishing tool and is not
recommended. OpenOffice has
somewhat better structured
documentation functionality than
word and may be a better choice if
politics or requirement to use .doc
as a document interchange format
preclude a better alternative. Wordperfect is also
considerably better for
documentation-in-the-large than word
and still has a presence in several vertical markets
such as legal offices.
Madcap Software'sBlaze and Flare: These
are new kids on the block and live
in roughly the same space as
Framemaker. The company was founded by former
eHelp (creators of RoboHelp) employees and is
actively developing, with multiple releases yearly. Their
offerings have greatly expanded in the past two years,
to the detriment of the quality of the individual products.
It seems focus has been on turning out new products and
by consequence there are a lot of "fit and finish" issues in
each. The authors have chosen to reinvent the wheel in many ways,
resulting in confusing and often broken implementations. Save often,
you will encounter unhandled exceptions. Source control integration
is flaky. For example, moving or deleting a group of files will result in
one source control commit for each file deletion. Big PITA when
you have source control email notifications. Hello 500 emails.
Flare can import Word and Framemaker files, but the import
is far from seamless. Expect to retain all of your content
but plan on completely re-styling from scratch.
Flare shares many of Word's tendancies to do too much behind
the scenes and assume what the user would choose. The HTML looks
like what Word outputs when you export HTML - lots of custom tags
and attributes, deeply nested inline styles, etc. The text
editor is maddening, for example, its cursor model is different
than any other software you've ever used.
Framemaker vs. LaTeX
These two are main systems I have used to produce large, presentable system documents and I've had good results with both.
Ease of Learning: TeX can give you absolute control but actually
achieving this on a complex LaTeX
document without breaking other
items isn't trivial, particularly
where a large number of macro
packages are involved. Basic LaTeX
isn't hard to learn, but making
modified versions of .sty files that
still work takes a bit of tinkering
if you're not a really deep TeX
hacker. It can be done but be
prepared to spend quite a lot of
time fiddling.
Framemaker can give you a good degree of control on the look of the document and isn't that hard to learn. Getting a house style and tweaking the layout (which you probably will have to do) will be easier with Framemaker.
Ease of Text Entry: You can use tools such as Lyx to provide a
wordprocessor-like front end to
LaTeX, and these work well if you
want to write large bodies of text.
Framemaker's DTP-like user interface
works in a way familiar to people
who are used to wordproessing
software. From this perspective
there is little practical
difference.
Templating Document Structure: Framemaker allows a document
structure to be defined in terms of
tags or an XML schema (if using
Structured Framemaker). LaTeX has a
set of canned structural elements
that are flexible enough to be
useful. Adding additional
structural elements (e.g. a data
dictionary item) can be done as a
macro, but making them auto-number
is a bit more challenging and you will
need to poke around behind the
scenes. Both can do it, but it's
considerably more technical to do it
in LaTeX in anything but trivial
cases.
Also, LaTeX does not have
the facility to template the
document structure in the way that
Structured Framemaker does.
However, you can achieve this type
of effect with DocBook and then
generate to LaTeX if desired.
Ease of Integration: I found making a generator for non-trivially
complex MIF files to be quite
fiddly. The MIF parser is quite
pernickety in FM and doesn't really
give good diagnostics. LaTeX
produces far better error messages
and is quite a bit less fussy.
Technical Publishing Software vs. Layout Software
Page layout software started with Pagemaker and the other main players in this space were its competitor Quark Xpess and now InDesign, with which Adobe is essentially trying to deprecate and replace it and Framemaker. Scribus, which you mentioned before, lives in the same space as these products.
If you are producing a manual with less than (say) 50-100 pages, one of the packages would probably do an adequate job. They are really designed for advertising and layout-heavy publication tasks such as magazines, so their support for large-document features of the sort found in Framemaker is fairly limited. The key issue with these products is scalability - they do not work well on large documents.
Just for reference I have actually typeset a 200-page book (someone's autobiography) using Pagemaker. While the fine-grained kerning and leading control helps a bit for copyfitting, it is still a highly manual process to lay out a book sized document. In this case the book was just straight text with no significant cross-referencing or structure other than chapters. Doing a complex technical spec document or manual this size with Pagemaker would have been very fiddly and probably next to impossible to get right without any mistakes.
Technical Publishing vs. Word Processing Software
This is more of a description of key shortcomings of MS-Word for large spec documents. However, it will illustrate some of the main features required for documentation-in-the-large:
Indexing and Cross-Referencing: This is a real chore in Word, and
quite unstable. Framemaker's
tagging features and LaTeX's labels
mean that you can assign a tag or
known label (in a predictable format
if necessary). The textual format
for the tag anchors is exposed in
the user interface, and is used for
the linkage. In Word, the anchors
are much more opaque and not
easily controllable in this way.
Combined with the clumsy user
interface and instability of the
product, this makes maintaining
these fiddly, and often unstable -
you often have to manually fix them
up.
Templated Layouts: Style support in word are quite basic and
numbering tends to be somewhat
unstable. FrameMaker is all about
driving from the tags and applying
styles based on the tags. Global
style changes just work in
Framemaker in a way that they do not
in Word.
Large multi-file Documents: I've never been able to make this work
well in Word, but it is a key
feature in Framemaker and LaTeX.
Again, Word's instability means that
you tend to spend a lot of time
tidying up after it. As the
document grows larger, the
proportion of time spent on this
work grows quadratically -
propensity for breakage proportional
to n (size of document) * time to
fix proportional to size n (time
to fix)
Why is Word so Unstable: Word does a lot behind the scenes to
support novice users and intervene
in layouts. It is also not really
frame-based (text flow conceptually
separate from document layout), but
the developers try to implement
various frame-like behaviours in the UI. When
the A.I. second-guesses you on a
complex document it often does the
wrong thing. Framemaker 'treats the
user as an adult' and does none of
this so things stay where you put
them.
Other word processors such as
Open Office and WordPerfect do not
misbehave in quite the same way as
Word, which is one of the reasons
that just about any word
processor other than Word will do a
better job of technical documents.
Pre-Flighting: In documentation-speak, this is the
process of checking that your
assemblage of files for the document
(image files etc.) is correct before
committing to print. The
professional systems will complain
about things that are wrong, giving
you a chance to correct it. Word
will just put on a happy face and
try to fix things behind the scenes.
A good example of this is a word
file with linked graphics. If you
copy the file and graphics to
another directory and update one of
the graphics in situ, word may well
still read the file from the old
path (I've seen it do this) and not
the new one you've just updated.
However, this behaviour is not consistent and
typifies the rampant abuse of
unstable heuristics in that product.
Pre-Press Support: A publishing system extends into the pre-press
phase of the workflow. This means
it covers preparation for print.
Word processing software tends not
to have this functionality or have
it in a very limited form.
Without getting too far into this, a key difference is that publishing software tends to treat you like a consenting adult and not get in the way when you want to scale or automate things. One can use word processing software for large scale documentation but it has many design decisions adapted to casual users writing short documents with little regard for quality. These adaptations come at the expense of fitness-for-task on large scale document preparation work. The main issues I find with Word for spec documents are the poor indexing and cross-referencing and general instability issues where I am always having to go back and fix things. However, political considerations in most environments (I'm a contractor) mean one is often stuck with it.
Some general comments on the state of technical documentation software
Framemaker would be the obvious choice if Adobe didn't keep giving off signals that they are trying to deprecate it and move its user base to InDesign. However, FM is widely used in aerospace, software and engineering circles and Adobe's management would face a lynch mob if they actually EOL'd the product without a credible migration path. From what one reads on the web, Adobe's acquisition of FM was driven by John Warnock, but he was ousted and FM became a victim of office politics. The net result is that it's been moved to maintenance mode and is quite stagnant.
Ventura Publisher has also been relegated to a niche market to some extent, but at least Corel do not have two competing product lines in the way that Adobe do. It is probably a passable substitute for FM and may be more politically acceptable to PHB types as it is marketed as a 'business publishing' system.
Quicksilver and Arbortext both seem to be viable products, but are very expensive. I've not used either, so I can't really make any real judgement on their merits.
The markup language systems are free and very powerful in many ways. Lout might be a bit easier to work with as it doesn't have quite the level of legacy baggage that LaTeX does. DocBook is also quite widely used and does have quite a bit of tool support. These technologies put a significant squeeze on the 'geek' end of Framemaker's market share and do so on their merits - they have probably taken quite a chunk out of Adobe's profit margins over the years. I would not dismiss these technologies out of hand, but they will be harder to learn in practice.
You might try evaluating InDesign and a selected set of plugins (concentrate on those for tagging and cross-ref/index management). Finally, some of the word processing software (Wordperfect and OpenOffice) give you a reasonable toolkit for structured documentation and work considerably better for this than MS-Word.
PostScript
Yes, that is a pun. I haven't touched on Pre-Press functionality of any of these products. Printing and Pre-Press are technical fields in their own right and the scope for expensive mistakes means you should probably leave this up to specialists.
Framemaker, InDesign, Ventura, QuickSilver, Arbortext and (presumably) the MadCap products all come with facilities to do pre-press preparation. By and large, word processing software does not.
Doing pre-press with LaTeX tends to involve post-processing the PS output with software like psutils or rendering to PDF and taking the pre-press workflow from there. Generally, most pre-press houses can work from PDF, so a good PDF writing tool like Distiller is the best interface for work prepared from tools that are not designed for prepress work. Note that the quality of the output from Distiller tends to be better than the Ghostscript based ones like PDFCreator.
Note that the RGB colour space of a monitor does not have a direct map to a CYMK colour space used by a printing press. Actually getting colours - especially colour photos - to come out correctly on a press is somewhat fraught if you do not have the right kit. For print production, see a specialist unless you have reason to believe you know what you're doing. For a casual user I would still recommend this 15 years after I was involved in the industry, as mistakes are very expensive to fix once they're committed to print.
If you really do want to do colour print work in-house, you will probably need to calibrate your monitor. For best results, you should get a high-fidelity monitor like this one from HP. In order to calibrate the monitor you may also need a sensor like one of the ones described in this review if the monitor does not come with one. Most professional graphics cards like these from Nvidia, AMD or Matrox have facilities to support gamma correction; many consumer ones do as well. You will also need to get calibration data for the press you are going to be using to print, although the pre-press house will probably be able to do this.
As stated before, print media is quite technical in its own right, easy to get wrong and expensive to fix once it's gone to print. If you're not 100% certain you've got your calibration right, get a colour proof like a Chromalin. This is done from the actual film separations (and is thus quite expensive), so it gives an accurate rendition of the actual colour of the final printed article. Doing this for a few sample pages will give you accurate feedback about whether your calibration is set up right.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Aidan Ryan for expanding the section on Madcap products.
我会推荐 EC Software 的“帮助和手册”。 您可以从单个源文档创建印刷版手册、PDF、Windows 帮助文件 (CHM) 和基于 HTML Web 的帮助。
I would recommend "Help & Manual" from EC Software. You can create a printed manual, PDF, Windows help file (CHM), and HTML web based help from a single source document.
Adobe Framemaker indeed is the classic tool for writing user manuals. I've used it for all kinds of long documents, and it works very well. Too bad that Adobe left it to rot for years, before noticing that users wouldn't switch.
MSWord took till 2003 to get the bullet/numbering bugs out, and I don't know if they finally got master document working.
LaTeX still is a reasonable alternative. The format is easy to process, and you could generate it from a wiki.
如果您想要协作，那么基于语言的方法（LaTeX 是我的首选，尽管基于 XML 的方法也不错——Docbook 是这里的旗舰）确实有意义，特别是当您使用版本控制系统跟踪文件时。
任何使事情变得复杂的东西（例如任何具有二进制或专有格式的软件）都不会帮助您。
抱歉，如果这不是您想要的答案。
If you want collaboration, then a language-based approach (LaTeX would be my preference although XML-based ones are also good -- Docbook being the flagship here) does make sense, especially if you are tracking files with a version control system.
Anything that does complicate things like any software with a binary or proprietary format will not help you here.
We are using "Help & Manual" from EC Software and it works quite well. Our authors are spread through the U.S. so we share our content files via a hosted SVN server to manage version control. On each workstation we use Tortoise SVN to stay in sync. The product is extremely easy to use and productive.
我在 Word 中制作所有用户手册（不要与用户帮助文件混淆）。 然后我可以确定它们是否需要为 PDF、RTF、DOC，甚至转换为 HTML。 为了解决多用户更新问题，我将文件存储在源代码管理中，它可以处理所有这些有趣的事情。
Word (or your favorite word processor)
I make all my user manuals (not to be confused with user HELP files) in Word. Then I can determine if they need to be in PDF, RTF, DOC or even converted to HTML. To solve the multi-user updating issue, I store the file in Source Control which handles all those fun things.
See the Fastware Project blog for an in depth discussion of the tradeoffs of using DocBook etc. Scott Meyer has tried out a lot of possibilities and shares what he's thinking.
这两个程序都支持输出为 PDF 和 PostScript 文件格式，并且可以生成超链接和交互式内容。
Adobe InDesign CS5.5 is much better at cross references and long documents than earlier versions. It is very powerful and relatively easy to learn and use. The feature set is very rich and the more you learn about it the more you can do with it. It supports very powerful XML features and can import and export XML as needed. It can also map Styles to Tags and Tags to styles allowing you to create your XML in an automated fashion if you simply use a full set of character and paragraph styles. I have used the program for years and produced multiple projects from books to one-off advertisements. It is a graphic design tool, but has support for many aspects of book and manual production. I recommend it if you are more concerned with graphics, images or illustrations. InDesign support a wide number of import and export formats.
InDesign CS5.5 has added and improved support for both interactive content and export for EPUB (electronic book) and Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) electronic magazine formats.
Framemaker is an excellent tool for books, manuals and long technical documents. It is a bit harder to learn than InDesign but has a richer set of tools for building variables and running headers and footers, if you have the time and inclination to learn how to use them. It also has a very robust XML feature-set, but I have not used it personally.
Unfortunately, Framemaker suffers from lack of support for graphic design. The color system is based very kludgey and spot (PMS) colors are hard to define. Simple things like adding a stroke color and fill color are rudimentary at best. For example, you still can't select a stroke color that's different from an objects fill color. The program is intended to output to laser and inkjet printers and not really to printing presses.
One feature that is really cool is the ability to apply master pages based on the Paragraph styles appearing on the page. The paragraph/illustration numbering in Framemaker is superior to any other program that I have ever used. But it is also difficult to learn and use.
Both programs support output to PDF and PostScript file formats and can generate hyperlinks and interactive content.
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评论（11）
技术出版软件 - 对 FrameMaker 及其替代品的看法
I使用 LaTeX 和 Framemaker 完成了规范文档，并设计了 Framemaker 工作流程来支持由 5 名分析师组成的团队为保险承保系统生成规范文档。 该文件预计有 2,000 页左右。 许多年前（大约 1992-1993 年）我还曾短暂担任过排字工。
Framemaker 专为技术文档而设计，并且确实做得非常好。它还具有支持多个作者的大型文档的功能 - 人们使用该系统来处理超过 100,000 页的文档。 对于熟悉文字处理软件的用户来说，它也比 LaTeX 更容易使用。
Framemaker的主要功能：
由多个组成的文档
文件：您可以将
“书”中有多个小节
不同的文件。 该文档可以
也应保存在源代码管理中。
文本 MIF 格式
进口/出口：进口商是
有点挑剔（我发现生成
使用 LaTeX 更容易）但是你可以
生成数据等项目
字典并将它们导入到
该文件。 该文件有文字
锚点（见下文），这样你就可以
创建交叉引用链接
进口方面将保持稳定。 我
发现这是一个关键功能
规格，因为它允许交叉引用
直接链接到生成的项目。
强大的标记、索引和交叉引用系统：一切
基于 Framemaker 中的标签和
轻松快速地应用标签。
这意味着交叉引用，
索引、条件文本和
整体应用样式非常简单
正常工作。 您可以根据标签生成索引和目录，因此
拥有多个专门索引
（例如数据字段名称列表
来自屏幕或数据字典）
很容易做到。 该文件我
上述有4个单独的
索引。
稳定： Framemaker 专为
专业人士，所以不第二
按照这个词的意思猜你。
在大型设备上也更加稳定
文件。 任何尝试过的人
写一篇50-100以上的文档
Word 上的页面应该有一个漂亮的
很好地理解这意味着什么。
可编写脚本： FM 有一个 C API，并且有
是各种脚本插件
（FrameScript 和 FMPython
可能是使用最广泛的）
可用于自动化工作
在调频中。 Framemaker 10 增加了支持
基于 Javascript 的脚本工具
大概称为 Extendscript
从脚本编写工具移植过来
在 InDesign 中。
单一来源：来自单一 FM
您可以生成 PDF 文档，
Windows 帮助 (CHM)、HTML 和打印
文档相当容易。 这
交叉引用还解决了
超链接。
全局样式控件：您可以
轻松设置文档样式
并将其应用到整个
文档。 这也有利于
运行页眉和页脚
具有很大的灵活性
他们跟踪部分、版本、
章节等。
Framemaker 的替代品
你不想要标记
语言，但是 TeX 和
Lout 系统用于大型
结构化文档并执行此操作
好吧。
Ventura 发布商： 可能是
Framemaker 的唯一真正替代品
如果你想要那种用户界面
无需支付身体部位的费用
特权。
它对结构化有强大的支持
文档和基于 XML 的文档
交换格式。 现在已经拥有了
由 Corel 开发，他们似乎仍在积极推广它。
市场上还有其他一些技术发布工具：Quicksilver （曾经被称为Interleaf) 和 ArborText。 这两个都是强大的工具——Interleaf 曾经一度是这一领域的市场领导者——但相当昂贵。
Adobe Indesign： 虽然 Adobe
声称你可以处理大型文档
使用 InDesign，交叉引用
和其他大文档功能
往往被视为缺乏
制框爱好者。 有，
然而，它的文本输入系统
名为 InCopy 显然
确实有这样的
功能性和相当
大量第三方
插件，其中一些可以
支持标记和其他此类设施。
InDesign 还具有脚本 API 和
用于执行的 JavaScript 解释器
脚本。
我没用过Indesign，
所以我无法真正评论如何
它在实践中很有效。
DocBook： 这真的只是
结构化的标准格式
文档但拥有庞大的生态系统
围绕它的写作工具
和渲染文档。 如果你
不想使用 LaTeX 你会
可能不想使用 DocBook
类似的原因。 作为 Vinko Vrsalovic
指出（+1），这个链接 转到 StackOverflow
某人的帖子描述了使用
DocBook 的实践。
我从未真正使用过 DocBook，但我
对这篇文章进行了如此多的编辑，现在它处于 Wiki 模式，所以
熟悉 DocBook 的人可能会
想要详细说明这一点。
文字处理软件： 字词
作为一个存在严重的缺点
技术发布工具而不是
受到推崇的。 OpenOffice 有
结构更好一些
文档功能比
如果是的话，可能是更好的选择
使用 .doc 的政治或要求
作为文档交换格式
排除更好的选择。
Wordperfect 也是
明显更好地
比字大的文档
并且仍然在多个垂直市场占有一席之地
例如法律办公室。
Madcap Software 的 Blaze 和 Flare ：这些
是街区里的新孩子并且住着
在大致相同的空间中
制框师。 该公司由前
eHelp（RoboHelp 的创建者）员工，并且是
积极开发，每年发布多个版本。 他们的
过去两年，产品种类大幅增加，
从而损害个别产品的质量。
看来重点是推出新产品
因此，存在很多“装配和完成”问题
每个。 作者选择以多种方式重新发明轮子，
导致混乱且经常被破坏的实现。 经常保存，
你会遇到未处理的异常。 源代码控制集成
是片状的。 例如，移动或删除一组文件将导致
每个文件删除都有一个源代码控制提交。 大皮塔饼什么时候
您有源代码管理电子邮件通知。 你好 500 封电子邮件。
Flare可以导入Word和Framemaker文件，但是导入
远非无缝。 希望保留您的所有内容
但计划从头开始完全重新设计。
Flare 与 Word 的许多倾向一样，都在背后做太多事情
场景并假设用户会选择什么。 HTML 看起来
就像导出 HTML 时 Word 输出的内容一样 - 许多自定义标签
和属性，深度嵌套的内联样式等。文本
编辑器很抓狂，比如它的光标模型不一样
比您使用过的任何其他软件都要好。
Framemaker 与 LaTeX
这两个是我用来生成大型、可呈现的系统文档的主要系统，并且我使用这两个系统都取得了良好的效果。
易于学习：TeX 可以给你绝对的控制权，但实际上
在复杂的 LaTeX 上实现这一点
不破坏其他文档
项目并非微不足道，特别是
其中有大量宏
涉及到包。 基础乳胶
学习并不难，但制作
.sty 文件的修改版本
仍然需要一些修补工作
如果你不是一个真正深入的 TeX
黑客。 这是可以做到的，但是
准备花费相当多的钱
时间摆弄。
Framemaker 可以让您很好地控制文档的外观，而且学习起来并不难。 使用 Framemaker 获得房屋风格和调整布局（您可能必须这样做）会更容易。
轻松输入文本：您可以使用 Lyx 等工具来提供一个
类似文字处理器的前端
LaTeX，如果你
想要写大量的文字。
Framemaker 类似 DTP 的用户界面
以人们熟悉的方式工作
谁习惯了文字处理
软件。 从这个角度来看
没有什么实用的
差异。
模板文档结构： Framemaker 允许文档
结构定义为
标签或 XML 模式（如果使用
结构化框架制造商）。 LaTeX 有一个
一组罐装结构元件
足够灵活
有用。 添加额外的
结构元素（例如数据
字典项）可以作为
宏，但使它们自动编号
更具挑战性，你会
需要在后面摸索
场景。 两者都可以做到，但这是
做到这一点要技术得多
在 LaTeX 中，一切都不是微不足道的
案例。
此外，LaTeX 没有
模板化的工具
文档结构的方式
Structured Framemaker 可以。
但是，您可以实现这种类型
与 DocBook 的效果然后
如果需要，生成为 LaTeX。
易于集成：我发现制作一个生成器并不简单
复杂的 MIF 文件相当
繁琐的。 MIF 解析器相当
调频中很挑剔，但实际上并非如此
提供良好的诊断。 乳胶
产生更好的错误消息
并且不那么挑剔。
技术出版软件与布局软件
页面布局软件始于 Pagemaker 该领域的其他主要参与者是其竞争对手 Quark Xpess 以及现在的 InDesign，Adobe 本质上是 InDesign试图弃用并取代它和 Framemaker。 您之前提到的 Scribus 与这些产品处于同一空间。
如果您要制作一本少于（例如）50-100 页的手册，其中一个包可能就足够了。 它们实际上是为广告和杂志等布局繁重的出版任务而设计的，因此它们对 Framemaker 中那种大文档功能的支持相当有限。 这些产品的关键问题是可扩展性——它们不能很好地处理大型文档。
仅供参考，我实际上使用 Pagemaker 排版了一本 200 页的书（某人的自传）。 虽然细粒度的字距调整和行距控制对复印有一定帮助，但布置书籍大小的文档仍然是一个高度手动的过程。 在这种情况下，这本书只是简单的文本，除了章节之外没有显着的交叉引用或结构。 使用 Pagemaker 制作如此大小的复杂技术规范文档或手册会非常繁琐，并且可能几乎不可能不犯任何错误。
技术出版与文字处理软件
这更多地描述了 MS-Word 对于大型规格文档的主要缺点。 但是，它将说明大型文档所需的一些主要功能：
索引和交叉引用：这在 Word 中确实是一件苦差事，并且
相当不稳定。 框架制造商的
标记功能和 LaTeX 的标签
意味着您可以分配一个标签或
已知标签（以可预测的格式
如果需要的话）。 文本格式
对于标签锚点暴露在
用户界面，用于
的联系。 在 Word 中，锚点
更加不透明，而不是
通过这种方式很容易控制。
结合笨拙的用户
界面和不稳定性
产品，这使得维护
这些繁琐且经常不稳定的 -
你经常需要手动修复它们
模板化布局：Word 中的样式支持非常基本，
编号往往有点
不稳定。 FrameMaker 是关于
从标签驾驶并应用
基于标签的样式。 全球的
风格的改变才起作用
框架制造商以他们不具备的方式
大型多文件文档：我从来没能做到这一点
Word 很好，但它是关键
Framemaker 和 LaTeX 中的功能。
同样，Word 的不稳定意味着
你往往会花很多时间
之后进行整理。 作为
文档变大，
花在这方面的时间比例
工作呈二次方增长——
破损倾向比例
至n（文档大小）* 时间
修复与大小n成比例（时间
修复）
为什么 Word 如此不稳定：Word 在幕后做了很多工作
支持新手用户并进行干预
在布局中。 这也不是真的
基于框架（概念上的文本流
与文档布局分开），但是
开发人员尝试实施
UI 中的各种类似框架的行为。 什么时候
人工智能会对你进行事后猜测
它经常做的复杂文档
错误的事情。 Framemaker'对待
用户作为成年人'并且不做任何事情
这样东西就留在你放的地方
他们。
其他文字处理器，例如
Open Office 和 WordPerfect 没有
行为不当的方式与
一句话，这是原因之一
几乎任何单词
Word 以外的处理器会执行
技术文档做得更好。
预检：用文档来说，这是
检查您的过程
文档的文件组合
（图像文件等）之前是正确的
承诺打印。 这
专业系统会抱怨
关于错误的事情，给予
你有机会改正它。 单词
只会露出幸福的表情
尝试在幕后解决问题。
一个很好的例子是一个单词
带有链接图形的文件。 如果你
将文件和图形复制到
另一个目录并更新其中一个
图形原位，文字也可以
仍然从旧的文件读取
路径（我见过它这样做）而不是
你刚刚更新的新的。
然而，这种行为并不一致
代表了猖獗的滥用行为
该产品中的启发式不稳定。
印前支持：出版系统延伸至印前
工作流程的阶段。 这意味着
它涵盖了印刷的准备工作。
文字处理软件往往不会
具有此功能或具有
它的形式非常有限。
在不深入讨论这一点的情况下，一个关键的区别是，发布软件倾向于将您视为同意的成年人，并且当您想要扩展或自动化事物时不会妨碍您。 可以使用文字处理软件来处理大型文档，但它有许多设计决策适合临时用户编写简短的文档，而很少考虑质量。 这些调整是以牺牲大规模文档准备工作的适应性为代价的。 我发现 Word for spec 文档的主要问题是较差的索引和交叉引用以及一般的不稳定问题，我总是不得不返回并修复问题。 然而，大多数环境中的政治考虑（我是一名承包商）意味着人们常常会坚持下去。
对技术文档软件现状的一些一般性评论
如果 Adobe 没有不断发出信号表明他们正试图弃用 Framemaker 并将其用户群转移到 InDesign，那么 Framemaker 将是显而易见的选择。 然而，FM 广泛应用于航空航天、软件和工程领域，Adobe 的管理层将面临私刑暴徒 如果他们实际上在没有可靠的迁移路径的情况下停产了产品。 从网上了解到，Adobe收购FM是由John Warnock推动的，但他被赶下台，FM成为办公室政治的牺牲品。 最终结果是它已转入维护模式并且相当停滞。
Ventura Publisher 在某种程度上也被降级为利基市场，但至少 Corel 没有像 Adobe 那样拥有两条相互竞争的产品线。 它可能是 FM 的一个不错的替代品，并且在政治上可能更容易被 PHB 类型所接受，因为它作为“商业出版”系统进行营销。
Quicksilver和Arbortext似乎都是可行的产品，但非常昂贵。 我也没有使用过，所以我真的无法对他们的优点做出任何真正的判断。
标记语言系统在许多方面都是免费的，而且非常强大。 Lout可能会更容易使用，因为它没有乳胶的遗产行李的水平。 DocBook也被广泛使用，并且确实具有大量的工具支持。 这些技术对Framekaker的市场份额的“极客”结束，并以其优点这样做 - 多年来，他们可能从Adobe的利润率中占据了很大一部分。 我不会失控这些技术，但是在实践中它们会更难学习。
您可以尝试评估Indesign和一组选定的插件（集中于标记和交叉索引管理的插件）。 最后，一些文字处理软件（WordPerfect和OpenOffice）为您提供了一个合理的结构化文档工具包，并且比MS-Word为此更好地工作。
PostScript
是的，这是双关语。 我没有谈到这些产品中的任何一个。 印刷和预装本身就是技术领域，昂贵错误的范围意味着您可能应该将其留给专家。
Framekaker，Indesign，Ventura，Quicksilver，Arbortext和（大概）MadCap产品都带有用于进行预压准备的设施。 总的来说，文字处理软件没有。
使用乳胶进行预压倾向于涉及使用等软件进行后处理PS输出。 psutils 或渲染到pdf并从那里获取预压工作流程。 通常，大多数预压房屋都可以从PDF使用，因此，像Distiller这样的良好PDF写作工具是从不设计用于预制作工作的工具中准备的最佳界面。 请注意，产出质量来自蒸馏器倾向于比 ghostscript 基于 pdfcreator 。
请注意，监视器的RGB颜色空间没有直接地图与印刷机使用的CYMK颜色空间。 实际上，如果您没有合适的套件，则获得颜色 - 尤其是颜色照片 - 正确地出现在新闻发布会上。 对于印刷生产，请参阅专家，除非您有理由相信自己知道自己在做什么。 对于一个休闲用户，我仍然建议在我参与该行业的15年之后，因为错误是 非常 一旦他们承诺打印就可以修复昂贵。
如果您确实想在内部进行彩色印刷工作，则可能需要 calibrate 你的显示器。 为了获得最佳效果，您应该获得一个高效率显示器，例如从hp发出的。 为了校准监视器，您可能还需要一个传感器，例如本评论 nvidia //ati.amd.com/products/firegl.html“ rel =” nofollow noreferrer“> amd 或 matrox 具有支持伽马校正的设施； 许多消费者也这样做。 您还需要获取要打印的媒体的校准数据，尽管预印屋可能可以做到这一点。
如前所述，印刷媒体本身就是非常技术性的，一旦打印出来，就很容易犯错，并且修复了昂贵。 如果您不是100％确定自己的校准正确，请获得彩色证明，例如 Chromalin < /a>. 这是从实际的胶片分离中完成的（因此非常昂贵），因此它可以准确地呈现最终印刷文章的实际颜色。 对于一些示例页面，这样做将为您提供有关是否正确设置校准的准确反馈。
致谢：感谢 Aidan Ryan 扩展了MadCap产品的部分。
Technical Publishing Software - Views on FrameMaker and Its Alternatives
I've done spec documents with LaTeX and Framemaker, and designed a Framemaker workflow to support a team of 5 analysts producing a spec document for an insurance underwriting system. The document was expected to get to 2,000 pages or so. Many years ago (around 1992-1993) I also worked briefly as a typesetter.
Framemaker is designed for technical documentation and does it very well indeed. It also has features designed to support very large documents with multiple authors - people use this system to do documents with more than 100,000 pages. It is also more accessible than LaTeX to users familiar with word processing software.
Key features of Framemaker:
Documents consisting of multiple
files: You can pull together a
'Book' with multiple subsections in
different files. The document can
also be kept in source control.
Textual MIF format for
import/export: The importer is
somewhat finicky (I found generating
working LaTeX to be easier) but you can
generate items such as data
dictionaries and import them into
the document. The file has textual
anchors (see below) so you can
create cross-reference links that
will be stable across imports. I
find this to be a key feature for
specs as it allows cross-references
to link directly to generated items.
Powerful tagging, indexing and cross-referencing System: Everything
is based on tags in Framemaker and
it is easy to apply tags quickly.
This means that cross-referencing,
indexing, conditional text and
applying styles en-masse is easy and
just works. You can generate indexes and TOCs based on tags, so
having multiple specialised indexes
(such as a list of data field names
from screens or a data dictionary)
is easy to do. The document I
described above had 4 separate
indexes.
Stable: Framemaker is designed for
professionals so it doesn't second
guess you in the way that word does.
It is also much more stable on large
documents. Anyone who's tried to
write a document of more than 50-100
pages on Word should have a pretty
fair idea of what this implies.
Scriptable: FM has a C API and there
are various scripting plugins
(FrameScript and FMPython
being probably the most widely used)
which can be used to automate jobs
in FM. Framemaker 10 adds support
for a Javascript based scripting tool
called Extendscript, presumably
ported across from the scripting facility
in InDesign.
Single-sourcing: From a single FM
document you can produce PDF,
Windows Help (CHM), HTML and print
documents fairly easily. The
cross-references also resolve to
hyperlinks.
Global style controls: You can
easily set up styles for a document
and apply it across the whole
document. It also facilitates
running headers and footers with a
great deal of flexibility in having
them track sections, versions,
chapters etc.
Alternatives to Framemaker
LaTeX/Lout: You've already indicated
that you don't want a markup
lanaguage, but the TeX and
Lout systems are used for large
structured documents and do this
well.
Ventura Publisher: Probably the
only real alternative to Framemaker
if you want that sort of user interface
without paying bodily parts for the
privilege.
It has strong support for structured
documents and an XML-based document
interchange format. It's now owned
by Corel, who still appear to be actively promoting it.
There are a couple of other technical publishing tools on the market: Quicksilver (which used to be known as Interleaf) and ArborText. These two are powerful tools - Interleaf used to be the market leader in this field at one point - but quite expensive.
Adobe Indesign: Although Adobe
claim you can do large documents
with InDesign, the cross-referencing
and other large document features
tend to be viewed as lacking by
Framemaker afficionados. There is,
however, a text entry system for it
called InCopy that apparently
does have this sort of
functionality and quite
a large body of Third-party
plugins, some of which do
support tagging and other such facilities.
InDesign also has a scripting API and
a JavaScript interpreter for executing
scripts.
I haven't used Indesign,
so I can't really comment on how
well it works in practice.
DocBook: This is really just
a standard format for structured
documents but has a large ecosystem
of tools surrounding it for writing
and rendering documents. If you
don't want to use LaTeX you will
probably not want to use DocBook for
similar reasons. As Vinko Vrsalovic
points out (+1), This link goes to a StackOverflow
post from someone describing using
DocBook in practice.
I've never really used DocBook and I've
made so many edits to this post that it's now in Wiki mode, so
someone familiar with DocBook might
want to elaborate on this.
Word processing software: Word
has serious shortcomings as a
technical publishing tool and is not
recommended. OpenOffice has
somewhat better structured
documentation functionality than
word and may be a better choice if
politics or requirement to use .doc
as a document interchange format
preclude a better alternative.
Wordperfect is also
considerably better for
documentation-in-the-large than word
and still has a presence in several vertical markets
such as legal offices.
Madcap Software's Blaze and Flare: These
are new kids on the block and live
in roughly the same space as
Framemaker. The company was founded by former
eHelp (creators of RoboHelp) employees and is
actively developing, with multiple releases yearly. Their
offerings have greatly expanded in the past two years,
to the detriment of the quality of the individual products.
It seems focus has been on turning out new products and
by consequence there are a lot of "fit and finish" issues in
each. The authors have chosen to reinvent the wheel in many ways,
resulting in confusing and often broken implementations. Save often,
you will encounter unhandled exceptions. Source control integration
is flaky. For example, moving or deleting a group of files will result in
one source control commit for each file deletion. Big PITA when
you have source control email notifications. Hello 500 emails.
Flare can import Word and Framemaker files, but the import
is far from seamless. Expect to retain all of your content
but plan on completely re-styling from scratch.
Flare shares many of Word's tendancies to do too much behind
the scenes and assume what the user would choose. The HTML looks
like what Word outputs when you export HTML - lots of custom tags
and attributes, deeply nested inline styles, etc. The text
editor is maddening, for example, its cursor model is different
than any other software you've ever used.
Framemaker vs. LaTeX
These two are main systems I have used to produce large, presentable system documents and I've had good results with both.
Ease of Learning: TeX can give you absolute control but actually
achieving this on a complex LaTeX
document without breaking other
items isn't trivial, particularly
where a large number of macro
packages are involved. Basic LaTeX
isn't hard to learn, but making
modified versions of .sty files that
still work takes a bit of tinkering
if you're not a really deep TeX
hacker. It can be done but be
prepared to spend quite a lot of
time fiddling.
Framemaker can give you a good degree of control on the look of the document and isn't that hard to learn. Getting a house style and tweaking the layout (which you probably will have to do) will be easier with Framemaker.
Ease of Text Entry: You can use tools such as Lyx to provide a
wordprocessor-like front end to
LaTeX, and these work well if you
want to write large bodies of text.
Framemaker's DTP-like user interface
works in a way familiar to people
who are used to wordproessing
software. From this perspective
there is little practical
difference.
Templating Document Structure: Framemaker allows a document
structure to be defined in terms of
tags or an XML schema (if using
Structured Framemaker). LaTeX has a
set of canned structural elements
that are flexible enough to be
useful. Adding additional
structural elements (e.g. a data
dictionary item) can be done as a
macro, but making them auto-number
is a bit more challenging and you will
need to poke around behind the
scenes. Both can do it, but it's
considerably more technical to do it
in LaTeX in anything but trivial
cases.
Also, LaTeX does not have
the facility to template the
document structure in the way that
Structured Framemaker does.
However, you can achieve this type
of effect with DocBook and then
generate to LaTeX if desired.
Ease of Integration: I found making a generator for non-trivially
complex MIF files to be quite
fiddly. The MIF parser is quite
pernickety in FM and doesn't really
give good diagnostics. LaTeX
produces far better error messages
and is quite a bit less fussy.
Technical Publishing Software vs. Layout Software
Page layout software started with Pagemaker and the other main players in this space were its competitor Quark Xpess and now InDesign, with which Adobe is essentially trying to deprecate and replace it and Framemaker. Scribus, which you mentioned before, lives in the same space as these products.
If you are producing a manual with less than (say) 50-100 pages, one of the packages would probably do an adequate job. They are really designed for advertising and layout-heavy publication tasks such as magazines, so their support for large-document features of the sort found in Framemaker is fairly limited. The key issue with these products is scalability - they do not work well on large documents.
Just for reference I have actually typeset a 200-page book (someone's autobiography) using Pagemaker. While the fine-grained kerning and leading control helps a bit for copyfitting, it is still a highly manual process to lay out a book sized document. In this case the book was just straight text with no significant cross-referencing or structure other than chapters. Doing a complex technical spec document or manual this size with Pagemaker would have been very fiddly and probably next to impossible to get right without any mistakes.
Technical Publishing vs. Word Processing Software
This is more of a description of key shortcomings of MS-Word for large spec documents. However, it will illustrate some of the main features required for documentation-in-the-large:
Indexing and Cross-Referencing: This is a real chore in Word, and
quite unstable. Framemaker's
tagging features and LaTeX's labels
mean that you can assign a tag or
known label (in a predictable format
if necessary). The textual format
for the tag anchors is exposed in
the user interface, and is used for
the linkage. In Word, the anchors
are much more opaque and not
easily controllable in this way.
Combined with the clumsy user
interface and instability of the
product, this makes maintaining
these fiddly, and often unstable -
you often have to manually fix them
up.
Templated Layouts: Style support in word are quite basic and
numbering tends to be somewhat
unstable. FrameMaker is all about
driving from the tags and applying
styles based on the tags. Global
style changes just work in
Framemaker in a way that they do not
in Word.
Large multi-file Documents: I've never been able to make this work
well in Word, but it is a key
feature in Framemaker and LaTeX.
Again, Word's instability means that
you tend to spend a lot of time
tidying up after it. As the
document grows larger, the
proportion of time spent on this
work grows quadratically -
propensity for breakage proportional
to n (size of document) * time to
fix proportional to size n (time
to fix)
Why is Word so Unstable: Word does a lot behind the scenes to
support novice users and intervene
in layouts. It is also not really
frame-based (text flow conceptually
separate from document layout), but
the developers try to implement
various frame-like behaviours in the UI. When
the A.I. second-guesses you on a
complex document it often does the
wrong thing. Framemaker 'treats the
user as an adult' and does none of
this so things stay where you put
them.
Other word processors such as
Open Office and WordPerfect do not
misbehave in quite the same way as
Word, which is one of the reasons
that just about any word
processor other than Word will do a
better job of technical documents.
Pre-Flighting: In documentation-speak, this is the
process of checking that your
assemblage of files for the document
(image files etc.) is correct before
committing to print. The
professional systems will complain
about things that are wrong, giving
you a chance to correct it. Word
will just put on a happy face and
try to fix things behind the scenes.
A good example of this is a word
file with linked graphics. If you
copy the file and graphics to
another directory and update one of
the graphics in situ, word may well
still read the file from the old
path (I've seen it do this) and not
the new one you've just updated.
However, this behaviour is not consistent and
typifies the rampant abuse of
unstable heuristics in that product.
Pre-Press Support: A publishing system extends into the pre-press
phase of the workflow. This means
it covers preparation for print.
Word processing software tends not
to have this functionality or have
it in a very limited form.
Without getting too far into this, a key difference is that publishing software tends to treat you like a consenting adult and not get in the way when you want to scale or automate things. One can use word processing software for large scale documentation but it has many design decisions adapted to casual users writing short documents with little regard for quality. These adaptations come at the expense of fitness-for-task on large scale document preparation work. The main issues I find with Word for spec documents are the poor indexing and cross-referencing and general instability issues where I am always having to go back and fix things. However, political considerations in most environments (I'm a contractor) mean one is often stuck with it.
Some general comments on the state of technical documentation software
Framemaker would be the obvious choice if Adobe didn't keep giving off signals that they are trying to deprecate it and move its user base to InDesign. However, FM is widely used in aerospace, software and engineering circles and Adobe's management would face a lynch mob if they actually EOL'd the product without a credible migration path. From what one reads on the web, Adobe's acquisition of FM was driven by John Warnock, but he was ousted and FM became a victim of office politics. The net result is that it's been moved to maintenance mode and is quite stagnant.
Ventura Publisher has also been relegated to a niche market to some extent, but at least Corel do not have two competing product lines in the way that Adobe do. It is probably a passable substitute for FM and may be more politically acceptable to PHB types as it is marketed as a 'business publishing' system.
Quicksilver and Arbortext both seem to be viable products, but are very expensive. I've not used either, so I can't really make any real judgement on their merits.
The markup language systems are free and very powerful in many ways. Lout might be a bit easier to work with as it doesn't have quite the level of legacy baggage that LaTeX does. DocBook is also quite widely used and does have quite a bit of tool support. These technologies put a significant squeeze on the 'geek' end of Framemaker's market share and do so on their merits - they have probably taken quite a chunk out of Adobe's profit margins over the years. I would not dismiss these technologies out of hand, but they will be harder to learn in practice.
You might try evaluating InDesign and a selected set of plugins (concentrate on those for tagging and cross-ref/index management). Finally, some of the word processing software (Wordperfect and OpenOffice) give you a reasonable toolkit for structured documentation and work considerably better for this than MS-Word.
PostScript
Yes, that is a pun. I haven't touched on Pre-Press functionality of any of these products. Printing and Pre-Press are technical fields in their own right and the scope for expensive mistakes means you should probably leave this up to specialists.
Framemaker, InDesign, Ventura, QuickSilver, Arbortext and (presumably) the MadCap products all come with facilities to do pre-press preparation. By and large, word processing software does not.
Doing pre-press with LaTeX tends to involve post-processing the PS output with software like psutils or rendering to PDF and taking the pre-press workflow from there. Generally, most pre-press houses can work from PDF, so a good PDF writing tool like Distiller is the best interface for work prepared from tools that are not designed for prepress work. Note that the quality of the output from Distiller tends to be better than the Ghostscript based ones like PDFCreator.
Note that the RGB colour space of a monitor does not have a direct map to a CYMK colour space used by a printing press. Actually getting colours - especially colour photos - to come out correctly on a press is somewhat fraught if you do not have the right kit. For print production, see a specialist unless you have reason to believe you know what you're doing. For a casual user I would still recommend this 15 years after I was involved in the industry, as mistakes are very expensive to fix once they're committed to print.
If you really do want to do colour print work in-house, you will probably need to calibrate your monitor. For best results, you should get a high-fidelity monitor like this one from HP. In order to calibrate the monitor you may also need a sensor like one of the ones described in this review if the monitor does not come with one. Most professional graphics cards like these from Nvidia, AMD or Matrox have facilities to support gamma correction; many consumer ones do as well. You will also need to get calibration data for the press you are going to be using to print, although the pre-press house will probably be able to do this.
As stated before, print media is quite technical in its own right, easy to get wrong and expensive to fix once it's gone to print. If you're not 100% certain you've got your calibration right, get a colour proof like a Chromalin. This is done from the actual film separations (and is thus quite expensive), so it gives an accurate rendition of the actual colour of the final printed article. Doing this for a few sample pages will give you accurate feedback about whether your calibration is set up right.
Acknowledgements: Thanks to Aidan Ryan for expanding the section on Madcap products.
我会推荐 EC Software 的“帮助和手册”。 您可以从单个源文档创建印刷版手册、PDF、Windows 帮助文件 (CHM) 和基于 HTML Web 的帮助。
I would recommend "Help & Manual" from EC Software. You can create a printed manual, PDF, Windows help file (CHM), and HTML web based help from a single source document.
我听说过有关 FrameMaker 的好消息。 我自己没有使用过它，但有人向我推荐它用于此类应用程序。
I've heard good things about FrameMaker. I've not used it myself, but have had it recommended to me for just such an application.
Adobe Framemaker 确实是编写用户手册的经典工具。 我用它来处理各种长文档，效果非常好。 不幸的是，Adobe 让它腐烂了很多年，才注意到用户不会更换。
MSWord 直到 2003 年才解决了项目符号/编号错误，我不知道他们是否最终让主文档正常工作。
LaTeX 仍然是一个合理的替代方案。 该格式很容易处理，您可以从 wiki 生成它。
Adobe Framemaker indeed is the classic tool for writing user manuals. I've used it for all kinds of long documents, and it works very well. Too bad that Adobe left it to rot for years, before noticing that users wouldn't switch.
MSWord took till 2003 to get the bullet/numbering bugs out, and I don't know if they finally got master document working.
LaTeX still is a reasonable alternative. The format is easy to process, and you could generate it from a wiki.
如果您想要协作，那么基于语言的方法（LaTeX 是我的首选，尽管基于 XML 的方法也不错——Docbook 是这里的旗舰）确实有意义，特别是当您使用版本控制系统跟踪文件时。
任何使事情变得复杂的东西（例如任何具有二进制或专有格式的软件）都不会帮助您。
抱歉，如果这不是您想要的答案。
If you want collaboration, then a language-based approach (LaTeX would be my preference although XML-based ones are also good -- Docbook being the flagship here) does make sense, especially if you are tracking files with a version control system.
Anything that does complicate things like any software with a binary or proprietary format will not help you here.
Sorry if it is not the answer you want.
我同意 Ollivier 的观点，即使用 DocBook（或 LaTEX）是实现轻松转换、合理格式设置和良好版本控制的最明智方法。
令人高兴的是，您可以尝试使用 DocBook 编辑器鱼与熊掌兼得。
尝试此列表上的那些，看看是否有满足您的需求（我没有使用过任何）。
I agree with Ollivier that using DocBook (or LaTEX) is the sanest approach to have easy conversion, sane formatting, nice version control.
Happily, you can try to have your cake and eat it too with a DocBook editor.
Try the ones on this list and see if any satisfies your needs (I haven't used any).
我们正在使用 EC 软件 中的“帮助和手册”，它运行得很好。 我们的作者遍布美国，因此我们通过托管 SVN 服务器共享内容文件来管理版本控制。 在每个工作站上，我们使用 Tortoise SVN 来保持同步。 该产品非常易于使用且高效。
We are using "Help & Manual" from EC Software and it works quite well. Our authors are spread through the U.S. so we share our content files via a hosted SVN server to manage version control. On each workstation we use Tortoise SVN to stay in sync. The product is extremely easy to use and productive.
关于 O'Reilly（实际上是销售所有这些书的人......）使用的一个非常好的解释：
O'Reilly Toolchain
它可能看起来很复杂，但根据您要编写的页面数量，您可能应该考虑一下。
A VERY nice explanation on what O'Reilly (actually the ones selling all these books...) uses:
O'Reilly Toolchain
It may seem complicated, but depending on the amount of pages you are going to write you maybe should put some consideration into it.
Word（或您最喜欢的文字处理程序）
我在 Word 中制作所有用户手册（不要与用户帮助文件混淆）。 然后我可以确定它们是否需要为 PDF、RTF、DOC，甚至转换为 HTML。 为了解决多用户更新问题，我将文件存储在源代码管理中，它可以处理所有这些有趣的事情。
Word (or your favorite word processor)
I make all my user manuals (not to be confused with user HELP files) in Word. Then I can determine if they need to be in PDF, RTF, DOC or even converted to HTML. To solve the multi-user updating issue, I store the file in Source Control which handles all those fun things.
请参阅 Fastware Project 博客，深入讨论使用 DocBook 等的权衡。Scott Meyer 已经尝试过很多可能性并分享他的想法。
See the Fastware Project blog for an in depth discussion of the tradeoffs of using DocBook etc. Scott Meyer has tried out a lot of possibilities and shares what he's thinking.
Adobe InDesign CS5.5 在交叉引用和长文档方面比早期版本要好得多。 它非常强大并且相对容易学习和使用。 该功能集非常丰富，您了解得越多，就能用它做更多的事情。 它支持非常强大的XML功能，可以根据需要导入和导出XML。 它还可以将样式映射到标签，并将标签映射到样式，如果您仅使用一整套字符和段落样式，则可以自动创建 XML。 我已经使用该程序多年，并制作了从书籍到一次性广告的多个项目。 它是一种图形设计工具，但支持书籍和手册制作的许多方面。 如果您更关心图形、图像或插图，我推荐它。 InDesign 支持多种导入和导出格式。
InDesign CS5.5 添加并改进了对交互式内容以及 EPUB（电子书）和 Adobe Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) 电子杂志格式导出的支持。
Framemaker 是书籍、手册和长技术文档的出色工具。 它比 InDesign 更难学习，但有一套更丰富的工具用于构建变量和运行页眉和页脚，如果您有时间和意愿学习如何使用它们的话。 它还具有非常强大的 XML 功能集，但我个人还没有使用过它。
不幸的是，Framemaker 缺乏对图形设计的支持。 颜色系统非常混乱，专色 (PMS) 很难定义。 添加描边颜色和填充颜色等简单的事情充其量只是初级的。 例如，您仍然无法选择与对象填充颜色不同的描边颜色。 该程序旨在输出到激光和喷墨打印机，而不是真正的印刷机。
一项非常酷的功能是能够根据页面上显示的段落样式应用母版页。 Framemaker 中的段落/插图编号优于我使用过的任何其他程序。 但学习和使用也很困难。
这两个程序都支持输出为 PDF 和 PostScript 文件格式，并且可以生成超链接和交互式内容。
Adobe InDesign CS5.5 is much better at cross references and long documents than earlier versions. It is very powerful and relatively easy to learn and use. The feature set is very rich and the more you learn about it the more you can do with it. It supports very powerful XML features and can import and export XML as needed. It can also map Styles to Tags and Tags to styles allowing you to create your XML in an automated fashion if you simply use a full set of character and paragraph styles. I have used the program for years and produced multiple projects from books to one-off advertisements. It is a graphic design tool, but has support for many aspects of book and manual production. I recommend it if you are more concerned with graphics, images or illustrations. InDesign support a wide number of import and export formats.
InDesign CS5.5 has added and improved support for both interactive content and export for EPUB (electronic book) and Adobe's Digital Publishing Suite (DPS) electronic magazine formats.
Framemaker is an excellent tool for books, manuals and long technical documents. It is a bit harder to learn than InDesign but has a richer set of tools for building variables and running headers and footers, if you have the time and inclination to learn how to use them. It also has a very robust XML feature-set, but I have not used it personally.
Unfortunately, Framemaker suffers from lack of support for graphic design. The color system is based very kludgey and spot (PMS) colors are hard to define. Simple things like adding a stroke color and fill color are rudimentary at best. For example, you still can't select a stroke color that's different from an objects fill color. The program is intended to output to laser and inkjet printers and not really to printing presses.
One feature that is really cool is the ability to apply master pages based on the Paragraph styles appearing on the page. The paragraph/illustration numbering in Framemaker is superior to any other program that I have ever used. But it is also difficult to learn and use.
Both programs support output to PDF and PostScript file formats and can generate hyperlinks and interactive content.