FrameMaker 12 documentation disappoints

As FrameMak­er is an author­ing tool made for tech­ni­cal writ­ers, you might think that its help would be exemplary—a show­case of the tool’s capa­bil­i­ties that would inspire oth­er writ­ers to per­form their best work.

Clear­ly, the Adobe tech­ni­cal com­mu­ni­ca­tion group does not share that vision. When I launched FrameMak­er’s help to search for clar­i­fi­ca­tion on its new fea­ture that enables authors to pub­lish to online help (with­out Robo­Help), I felt disappointed.

First, the image qual­i­ty of the screen cap­tures is so poor that I found myself squint­ing to deci­pher them. From the “Mul­ti­chan­nel pub­lish­ing” help top­ic, here are two exam­ples of pix­e­lat­ed graphics:

In addi­tion, I felt dis­ap­point­ed because the “Mul­ti­chan­nel pub­lish­ing” help top­ic is so long—it is 27 pages when copied to a Word file! A few suggestions:

• Chunk the con­tent: With a sea of text and a hand­ful of pix­e­lat­ed graph­ics (some of which are mis­aligned), it is over­whelm­ing. I’d split the con­tent into sub-pro­ce­dures to make the con­tent eas­i­er to digest.
• Reduce the text: Believe it or not, the “Mul­ti­chan­nel pub­lish­ing” help top­ic con­tains almost 7,000 words. When writ­ing con­tent that will be read online, aim to reduce the word count by 50 per­cent. That means if you write a doc­u­ment that is meant to be print­ed and it is 1,000 words, con­sid­er writ­ing 500 words for an online doc­u­ment. With­out a doubt, I’m sure that the con­tent could be more con­cise. For more infor­ma­tion about these guide­lines, see Ruth­less­ly edit when writ­ing for mobile.

I usu­al­ly don’t go out of my way to be crit­i­cal of oth­er tech­ni­cal doc­u­men­ta­tion. If you want to cre­ate online help that is not out­stand­ing, that’s your choice. But per­haps the Adobe writ­ers could at least strive for clear and concise?