This information was provided by Claris Corporation on 16 March 1998, and incorporated into Apple Computer's Tech Info Library.
Key features of P&S
You have the ability to publish or subscribe files over a network. The source files can actually be located on several different Macs, and the subscribers will update automatically whenever a publisher "saves" a change in the published document. Because publishers and subscribers are linked by the edition file, the link is maintained whether the files are renamed, moved or closed. This has some useful implications as far as usage goes. These are as follows. Using P&S saves disk space. An edition file is created with only selected data, not necessarily the entire file. This means that you can subscribe to a chart created with a relatively large spreadsheet, without having to subscribe to the entire spreadsheet file. Several subscribers can subscribe to the same edition. P&S thereby transparently supports workgroup production of documents.
If an application can publish an edition, then any other application that can subscribe can use it.
P&S has some usage limitations that may effect the planning of your document design and production. P&S will not
* Modify or edit subscriber data beyond formatting.
* Do irregular text wrap.
* Adjust network access to avoid network traffic or slow processing.
* Publish or subscribe to any graphic format other than PICT.
When to use P&S
Imagine you want to publish a weekly newsletter that consists of some articles, a chart, and pictures. You decide to use P&S, knowing that the creation of the elements of the newsletter can be delegated, so you inform the perspective sources of the articles, chart, and photos to publish edition files of their work and save them to a convenient location on your network (like a local server or a shared folder). You can simply open a new document and subscribe to those editions: With a little formatting, you have a newsletter.
When to use frames
While Publish & Subscribe provides a means to bring together data from various applications or documents, frames allow you to produce complex documents from within the same application. Use Frames to generate your entire newsletter. Frames allow you to integrate or combine different ClarisWorks application environments in a single document. Scan photos and insert graphics files into your document. In the same document, you create a spreadsheet frame and produce charts. Create text frames - taking advantage of the outline feature to organize ideas for articles. Within the same document, create a paint frame to produce a logo for your new publication.
You can move, resize, and change the appearance of frames. By clicking into a frame, you enter its application environment, and have access to the tools and commands in that environment. When you save a document that contains one or more frames, ClarisWorks stores each frame and its contents as part of that document.
The integration between word processing, database, spreadsheet, drawing, painting and communications environments is the power of using frames. This integration allows you to have complete control from within any ClarisWorks document over formatting the contents of frames. Elements such as irregular text wrapping in a drawing frame, combined with spreadsheet data in a spreadsheet frame can each be edited from the same document. In addition, frames themselves can be published to other documents entirely or in part.
Can P&S and Frames Be Used Simultaneously?
Returning to the newsletter example, once you create a single newsletter document, you discover that a new, larger document needs to be produced at a different location. This other larger document requires some or all of the same data of the original newsletter. The original newsletter was produced entirely with frames, but now you publish editions of several sections of the newsletter in the larger document. The larger document may consist of frames as well as subscribers generated by several different documents.
When an edition file needs updating but the person who created it is unavailable, you can subscribe to an edition file of text, for example. You can then select the text, copy it, and paste it into a text frame. You can edit or update this selected text from within its frame.
Using Publish & Subscribe in combination with frames allows you to combine features of each to get the most out of ClarisWorks. Frames, for example, are geared toward the single user, whose entire document production may occur right on the single desktop. Use only frames in your document production when you are creating documents whose basis is a "snap shot" or time slice of data that does not need to be updated. This data can be drawings or pictures, like a map, that change little or not at all over time. Use Publish and Subscribe in combination with frames for tasks that involve dynamic (changing) data to open up your document production and organization to an environment where information may be shared, managed, and updated in workgroup situations or other situations that require you to use a separate data source in whole or in part.