Looking for Suggestions: Migrating Away from Large FrameMaker PDF-Based Manuals
I'm looking for advice from other technical writers who work with industrial equipment or manufacturing documentation.
Currently, I create user manuals in Adobe FrameMaker and publish them as PDFs. This worked reasonably well when we had a limited number of products, but it has become increasingly difficult to maintain.
Our situation:
- We manufacture industrial equipment.
- We have hundreds of manuals.
- Many manuals are several hundred pages long.
- We support multiple product variants that share large amounts of content.
- Manuals must also be translated into multiple languages.
- Content updates often need to be applied across numerous documents.
- PDF remains an important deliverable, but it is no longer an efficient source format.
The biggest challenge is content reuse. FrameMaker allows some reuse mechanisms, but maintaining common content across hundreds of documents is becoming unsustainable. Translation costs and update management are also growing significantly.
I'm exploring a possible migration to a more modern documentation platform, preferably one that:
- Supports component-based authoring and content reuse.
- Handles large technical documentation sets.
- Works well for industrial equipment documentation (not just software documentation).
- Supports translation workflows and multilingual publishing.
- Ideally provides web-based publishing as well.
Many platforms I find seem heavily focused on software documentation and developer portals rather than traditional equipment user manuals, installation guides, maintenance manuals, and service documentation.
Oh, and I forgot to mention. No MadCap Flare or Paligo. The pricing is just too high and management will say no.