🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello Steve, 

I don't use AuthorIT, and have no real problem w/it per se. But some coworkers of mine in another group (some of whom are recovering SGML geeks) are quite comfortable working in that environment and seem to use it quite effectively.  

The deficit that I think I see with AuthorIT has to do w/localization. Caveat here - I am not a localization expert, but here is what I think I know. Using Frame, you can import the content into a system like Trados, translate the file, and export it straight back to Frame without any loss of formatting or other information that might loosely be considered "metadata." Then, you can use WebWorks (w/appropriate language-specific templates) to produce pre-translated versions of your other non-paper outputs.  

However, with AuthorIT, database traffic is basically one way, only. Content is exported out of the database as Word (or maybe rtf?) files, but a translated version of that content cannot be brought back into the database w/out losing all of the original structure and metadata. So basically, with AuthorIT, you can't do a single-source translation and then generate pre-translated outputs as I described above for the Frame/Webworks system. 

The folks here who use AuthorIT do not have localization needs, so it's not an issue for them. I'd also add that if anybody knows something different about how AuthorIT works in this context, I'd be really interested to know about it myself!