Interleaf??

[Jeanne]

I am a freelance designer and have been asked by a client to update
some owner's manuals originated in Interleaf. I have never heard of
this software. Does anyone have a suggestion for the most efficient
and cost-effective way to transfer the information to a format that
can easily be set in Quark or PageMaker? If I decided to work from
Interleaf, is it available for the Macintosh platform and, if so,
where do I get a copy of it?

Thanks!

[Charlie O]

Jeanne wrote:

Interleaf (now QuickSilver) is not available for the Mac. Don't believe
it ever has been. Interleaf is (or was) native to UNIX. Interleaf was
available for DOS, Windows and VAX (that I know of).

Interleaf has its on import/export capabilities, but porting to Quark or
Pagemaker is not among them. Your best bet would to have someone export
your file to Word/RTF and then import those files into Quark or
Pagemaker. I can probably help you with that.

Charlie O

[Dick Margulis]

Inagine that! Someone who works on a Macintosh and has never heard of
Interleaf! I'm shocked!

Okay, Jeanne, here's the deal. No, you cannot get a copy of Interleaf.
Your choices are:

1. Have the client (or a third party--you can seek one here--if the
client no longer has any employees using Interleaf), export the text
portion of the Interleaf documents as .rtf and import that into your
layout app of choice.

2. Have the client print the Interleaf docs to Distiller, creating PDFs,
and deal with them in Illustrator (pain in the butt, of course, but it
might work if the needed changes are minor). In any case, this will give
you access to any vector drawings and images.

3. Scan the docs and OCR them to extract the text.

4. Put the docs up on a copyholder and start typing.

5. Prepare a set of design specifications and some sample layouts.
Charge for the creative work and your time. Provide the revised design
to the client, as hardcopy, and let the client's Interleaf operators
figure out how to implement the changes in their files. (This would
actually be my first choice, if I were in your shoes and the client
still had competent Interleaf users on staff.)

6. Turn down the job.

Maybe I left something out, but I think I've covered the main choices.

[Jeanne]

Thank you both for the information... it has been very helpful! I will
talk with my client about our options and let you know.

Much appreciated!!
Jeanne

Charlie O <rolli...@NOSPAMearthlink.net> wrote in message news:<41757CB3...@NOSPAMearthlink.net>...

[Jeff Wiseman]

This is in addition to the suggestions already posted.

Interleaf has the capability of handling very complex documents
that are very big with lots of "pieces" (I've dealt with
Interleaf documents with over 15,000 pages). It was usually
selected by companies dealing with just these types of needs
(e.g., government, telecomm, etc.). Here are a few other items to consider:

1) How big are the documents being maintained? Interleaf tends to
be monolithic in nature and "pulling out a piece" of a document
to work on it elsewhere can be quite problematic even if you are
doing everything in Interleaf itself. If you aren't familiar with
Interleaf's idiosyncrasies of doing this you'll need someone
"inside" to do the extraction and replacement of the parts to
ensure proper integration regardless of how you do your editing.
Note that this ALSO applies, even if you had (say) Interleaf on a PC.

2) Does the client want the documents to remain in Interleaf
format? Converting a large Interleaf document to another format
and then back will destroy all kinds of book control information
that would have to be rebuild by someone expert in Interleaf and
Interleaf catalogs. Also note that although old Interleaf
documents can be read by newer versions like Quicksilver, there
are myriad backward-compatability issues getting the updated
documents viewable in the older format.

3) Unless this is a one-off type deal where you export the
originals into a format that you can update and then
print/publish without the requirement of actually updating the
original, I suspect that you really aren't going to be able to do
this at home. You'll need to have the entire document set and be
editing it in an environment simiar to what it was created in.

4) If the documents are small enough (i.e., you have the complete
document book, catalogs, etc.) and the client doesn't mind the
format being raised to a newer version (e.g., quicksilver), then
you might be able to get a copy of quicksilver that you could run
on softwindows (or equivalent) on your mac as I'm not sure if it
is available for the mac itself yet. I don't think that Interleaf
is even being sold/supported anymore although Quicksilver (a
rewrite of Interleaf v7) is likely available. Note that If you
take this path, my understanding is that there will be problems
for anyone still using Interleaf 7 to open the updated docs.

Anyway, my suggestion is that:

A) If the documentation is large using catalog and book control
and the client needs to keep the current Interleaf version format
and you aren't familiar with Interleaf, you should stay away from
it as you will likely enter a failing situation.

B) If the brochures are small, self contained, and don't have a
lot of fancy catalog control but the client needs them kept as
Interleaf (or possibly Quicksilver) documents for future
maintenance, then you will need to do editing using Interleaf or
Quicksilver which are only available on UNIX and PC right now. I
don't know what kind of Mac you're using. If it is OS X, it has a
UNIX base but I don't know whether the Motif interface is
available on it (Interleaf 7 uses Motif for its user interface on
UNIX). If you have a windows simulation program like softPC, you
MIGHT be able to run Interleaf 7 or quicksilver on it and do your
editing that way. However, even on a regular, fairly fast PC,
Interleaf 7 can be a dog so trying this on a slow mac running an
emulator could be a real problem in itself. Also, this approach
still requires you to learn Interleaf

C) If the brochures are small and self contained enough without a
lot of complex catalog driven formatting and graphics, and the
client doesn't mind you just doing your mods in a different
editor and leaving them in that format, the only real option is
to have someone export the documents from within Interleaf via
RTF. Exporting graphics out of Interleaf is a nuisance and you
would need someone who knew how to do it for you. You import the
RTF to whatever formate you needed and updated them there.

D) If the changes are all text oriented, those sections could be
exported as text only and modified anywhere. However, reinserting
them again puts you in a position where someone on the "inside"
at the client would have to reinstall then text and update all of
the formats for you.

I hope that this helps more than it confuses!

- Jeff