Slashdot Mirror
Adobe Discontinues FrameMaker for Linux
Stef Hoesli writes: "Adobe, who gave us a smoothly working beta version for Linux of their fine word processor,
will not release FrameMaker commercially on Linux.
They sent out an
e-mail to beta testers with the sad news.
"
Um, no. :)
PostScript wasn't designed for onscreen output, it was designed for resolution-independent printing, in effect moving the equivalent of MetaFont (and more) into the printer, so application programs--in theory--shouldn't have to worry about what they're printing to, as long as it's PostScript compatible.
And in practice, PostScript has done tremendously well. HP succeeded in fending it off from the low end of the market when they brought scalable fonts into PCL, but any laser printer that's more than $600 or so is going to be using Postscript or a compatible interpreter. (If it's a higher-end printer or typesetter, it's virtually guaranteed to be real Adobe Postscript.)
PDF was basically designed as a special application Postscript; a primary point was that it stores font metrics even when it doesn't store fonts, so a PDF reader can use a "master font" to recreate the document in a reasonably correct facsimile even if the fonts aren't available on the reading end. The bitch someone had about Adobe PDFs not embedding the fonts in them now is a valid complaint in one sense, but utterly misses the point in another--embedded fonts are supposed to be optional.
Also, PDF is not PostScript. PostScript is a programming language; PDF is a document format, with no support for programming constructs but with support for hyperlinks, bookmarks, and so on. It's more accurately compared to TeX's DVI format.
And, lastly, if people don't like PDF--hey, this is the open source world. Make your own alternative. But it better do everything that PDF 1.3 does, at least everything that people actually use, or it's not going to go anywhere. Of course, the PDF spec is open and fully documented--so, hell, make your own PDF writer that doesn't have an option for not embedding fonts. If XPDF doesn't handle master fonts, add handling for 'em, or make your own comparable solution--the PDF file won't care how it's getting rendered, after all.
First of all, discourage the floating away by using a location preference:
...
\begin{figure}[htb]
\end{figure}
so that TeX is encouraged to place the figure here, at the page top, or at the bottom, before assigning it to a float.
After that, the likely explanation is that you have at least one figure which is too large to fit in the available space on the page: if so, that and all subsequent floats float away to the end.
If you're including eps figures, fiddle the \epsscale value. Or try negative \vspace before and after including your figure. Hope that helps...
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Mac OS X.
Back when Adobe made Solaris versions of thier programs, Desktop publishing shops, all wanting faster machines, didn't want to get Solaris boxes.
Why?
A lack of other tools they are used to. No powerGoo, etc la.
If you are feeding a 10 million dollar press a $150,000 print job, and are paying someone $60,000 a year, is the price difference between a Mac VS a Open Source Unix OS a worry? No.
If Apple is able to keep its user base on the move to BSD unix, eventually code will slide sideways to X86 based BSD, then X86 based *linux. So, just un-bind your underware.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Just think about it.
* How many dtp people use Linux? These people are not, in the main, technical types into kernel recompilation. So no market for the product. Simple economics - I have graphics dudes around me, and they like Apple Macs, and, in a few cases, Windows - they don't like Unix, and couldn't use it.
* Inferior architecture - I've used Corel Photopaint on Linux, and it looks very ugly because of the lack of things like anti-aliasing (in the OS, not at a user level - the program looks ugly).
This is a *good* and brave decision - it's better to write the money off than to pour money into the Linux blackhole of giveaway software (Photopaint, etc.) - we don't want Adobe going the way of Corel.
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
A WYSIWYG typesetting program, as long as the programmers and users understand that you place frames on a page as opposed to inserting things into a text stream, will do a world of wonders for Linux.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I took Charles up on his challenge. Here's why: For us TWs, there aren't freeware tools out there that emulate what we're expected to use on the job. And one problem newbie/wannabee TWs have is getting the apps to establish some experience. FrameMaker, for one, is close to $800 a pop. For various reasons (expedience, venality, short-sightedness; take your pick) we're expected to know particular toolsets in addition to our general capabilities. It's like when programmers out there are told "We need a capable C++ programmer, sure, but we're using the Visual Age IDE, so you need to be experienced in that." So Ms. Newbie TW needs to hit the ground running with FrameMaker. Swell. If she can say "I use the clone all the time to write documentation as a volunteer for an Open Source project," a savvy HR or pubs manager will realize she'll be able to port that skillset easily and quickly.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
First off, FrameMaker is an excellent product - I've never seen anything that really compares to it. I've written a 700+ pp. textbook with it, and am in the process of writing a 250+ pp. business plan with it. I've used it for years and years. It's not a word processor, though it can be used as one. Here's some of the things that are unique:
That being said, who buys FrameMaker? It is almost never the individual user - O'Reilly authors being a possible exception (they have Frame templates for their Nutshell books that authors can download). It is largely IT managers at large technology corporations - Frame is suited for manuals and such, and its licensing server is designed for large installations (e.g., it supports x many licenses, and only lets x instances run at any one time, no matter how many desktops you have). These people are generally conservative about changing things. If they've got Solaris installed, they won't change unless they have to. These people are not going to Linux yet, unless the company itself is one of the Linux vendors.
So, Adobe sees that IT managers aren't going in droves to their beta program, just these crazy penguins from /., and concludes that the time is not right.
Bleah :-(
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Klactovedestene!
Otoh, I find GIMP Win32 to be faster, and Paint Shop Pro to be the best of the three. I even like Corel Photopaint better. What am I missing that the Photoshop lovers see?
I would just guess that you're not using it 8 hours a day in a professional deadline environment. I don't mean that in any derogatory way -- I doubt you could tell the difference between a sable hair brush and an ox hair brush by painting with it, but paying ten times as much for the sable hair is not a waste for a professional painter, because he CAN tell the difference (and use it).
The guy in the next office from me is a database programmer and uses PSP because he can't figure out Photoshop and never does anything but RGB web graphics and powerpoint images with it. I, on the other hand, send out stuff to printers and make huge montages and do fairly involved image editing work on 300+ meg files, so I use Photoshop.
If you don't work with SWOP, if you aren't concerned with ink density or screen angles,if you aren't created complex selection masks, then you probably don't need (or even want) Photoshop.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Actually, I think this argues that publishing is not heading toward commodity status; the "problem" may well be that Linux isn't making significant inroads into the publishing industry. A perceived lack of demand for a commercial DTP solution on Linux does not equate to a perceived lack of demand for commercial DTP solutions. Your perception of "bleeding edge" is likely quite different from that of a professional prepress operator, or a manager in HP's documentation division.
Say you have a 500-page manual to get out, that has to draw in chapters written by two dozen different contributors. 19 are in Word format, 4 are in WordPerfect format, and the one from the crusty weird engineer who rants about mainframes all the time is in XyWrite III+ format. Most of the chapters have graphics, generally in TIFF or EPS format. Obviously, the entire book has to be in a consistent style. And, of course, you need to have a table of contents, a list of illustrations, an index, and cross-references.
So which solution is cheaper--LaTeX, or FrameMaker? In terms of time spent doing the work, FrameMaker will win hands down. It'll convert all the document formats (even XyWrite) automatically and won't require you to pepper the document with TeXisms ("---" instead of "--", changing straight quotes to open/close, commands for formatting, etc.)--even if you come up with a script to help automate that process, it'll be much slower. Even an expert TeXnician will have trouble creating a set of style macros as quickly as style sheets could be built. And we haven't even gotten to the speed differences in index markup and image handling. These speed differences could mean weeks off the schedule--and that pays for FrameMaker every time you use it on a project like this.
And that--speed saved in work time--is really what commands premium pricing, I think. ESR's observation makes sense, but it can lead people to the wrong conclusions. Linux is a commodity solution because it's free--it's not free because it's a commodity. Distribution packagers can make money, ironically, for the same reason that FrameMaker can be sold even with free alternatives: people are paying them to cut down on the time and effort it would take to install a full Linux-based OS if you had to do everything yourself.
It works a lot better if you up the "Tile Cache Size" in preferences (if you have 128M, make it 50-60M or so. 25-30M images are then no prob). You can also add/reduce swapfile usage, although swapping is fairly sluggish unless you're running RAID0 or the like.
Still, CMYK and Pantone would be nice. The latter we may never see (Licensing=$$$). I do believe the former's on the cards. Fingers crossed.
-- Sig Sig Sputnik
My take on this is that Adobe's attitude toward Linux is becoming more callous all the time, so I recommend to anyone who will listen that they try to avoid using any Adobe product. I can't even count the number of online companies that have lost any chance to get my business because their online catalogs are amoung those PDF files that I can't view under Linux.
Repeat after me: PDF is bad.. Adobe is bad..
Adrian
Why?
I don't get it. They already have a Solaris/X11 based product. The Linux version looked exactly the same as the UNIX version, so you can't bitch about the UI. (Correct me it I'm wrong, but Solaris is still using X11, and doesn't have anti-aliasing either.) In the case of Photopaint, is it a matter of bad architecture, or of trying to simply shoe-horn an application from one architecture into another, without trying to understand the fundamental differences?
I don't discount the fact that there isn't a lot of money to be made off the Linux market, but I can't imagine that they are pouring vast amounts of money down a black hole in order to port FM from Unix to Linux!
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Your Servant, B. Baggins
Yes, but FrameMaker isn't a word processor. It can do so much more than Word can even dream of. Yes, there's probably a Word export option, but exporting to Word format would mean potentially losing layout and other information. Sure, you lose formatting info when you save to text (as they recommend) anyway, but if you're going to lose info, why not save in a format that's usable *everywhere*.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Framemaker is an SGML editor. What this means is you can create structured documents, like TeX and LaTex, using a wysiwig interface. You can also create unstructured documents, a poor man's MS Word (but it runs on UNIX too).
If you want DTP, you want Pagemaker. Framemaker itself has competition on linux from the office packages, Lyx and obviously TeX/LaTeX + text editor of choice.
Does my bum look big in this?
I use framemaker on a dayly basis for writing articles. Luckily I'm not working on linux, so I can continue to work with framemaker.
For those who don't know. Framemaker is a wordprocessor/dtp package for creating large, structured documents such as manuals or in my case, scientific articles. I know somebody who has written a few articles and a thesis with the linux beta. It was that good! I think he's going to be angry when he gets back from his holliday.
The framemaker way of working has been duplicated in KWord, so there's still some hope for the linux platform. Unfortunately, KWord lacks the portability framemaker has (currently is available on Mac, windows and solaris), also it is still a very immature product (0.something last time I checked).
Jilles
The UNIX ports included are Solaris, HPUX and AIX. I would be stunned if the market share for FrameMaker on AIX would be greater than the potential market share for FrameMaker on Linux. Given this I would guess that at least some of the UNIX ports are payed for by the owners of the respective operating system.
It's pretty common practice for companies to foot the bill for the development costs for pieces of software that they feel is necessary for the validity of their platform but which the software company doesn't feel it could make its development and marketing expenses back at. Since Linux doesn't have a company that really represents it (there are lots of companies that make money off of it, but no companies that represent it) the porting costs aren't payed.
The number of subscribers to the beta test program probably couldn't be extrapolated to a large enough paying user base. A large part of the blame to this probably lies on Adobe's head though, I happened across the beta program at a time when my main box was moving from a traditional UNIX platform to Linux.
The thing is, they could do it themselves. The beta worked quite nicely. All they have decided is that they aren't going to release it commercially for Linux at this time. They haven't ruled out releasing it when the market for Linux desktop apps is more conduicive to making money for Adobe. It's just not economically feasible now. Were they to open source it, they'd run the risk of decimating their Unix sales, and potentially eating into their Windows and Mac sales too.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
I may be off base, but I would have thought a Linux version would have been a valuable addition to them, not only because of the Linux market but also because of the market that can use Linux binaries. I would immagine (and I may be very wrong) that BSD users, or users of Solaris x86 would both benifit from a Linux version that they could run through each OS's linux compatibility layer (similar to the way Corel used WINE to make WordPerfect 2000 available on Linux).
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Is there a freeware alternative? Gimp is great as a Photoshop replacement, but what about Framemaker?
Dirty Pirate Hooker
Ultimately FrameMaker's "competition" in the Linux market isn't another program, it's an attitude--that there's always a free alternative, and that the free alternative is always preferable. In point of fact, there are alternatives but there is nothing similar to FrameMaker in the free software world. The closest to it is LyX. I like LyX (although after playing with it I decided I liked straight LaTeX better), but there are things FrameMaker can do that will always be difficult or even impossible for LyX to do, because TeX's concept of a document doesn't include frames. (KWord's concept of a document does, but it doesn't include everything else that FrameMaker does.)
This isn't terribly surprising--FrameMaker may not quite be in a vertical market, but it's close. The front page article describing it as a "word processor" is perhaps the biggest hint as to why Adobe gave up--it's not a word processor, it's a book publishing system. There are a lot of companies using it internally for documentation and technical manuals. Many of O'Reilly's books are produced with FrameMaker. Could you do all those things with LaTeX? Sure, given enough time--but this is one of those fields where a good GUI saves you an immense amount of work. I've done layout for magazines in the past, and I can assure you that even something like LyX would be an utter nightmare compared even to Microsoft Publisher, let alone PageMaker or Xpress.
I know there are Linux fans who won't use any non-free software on principle; while I'm not one of them, I respect that. But I'm sure Adobe knew about them and obviously wasn't targeting them. If they've backed away from this it's because, I would surmise, they feel that the people who are using Linux who aren't gung-ho "free as in speech" types are "free as in beer" types. They've adopted the rhetoric of the free software movement mostly because they like the idea of having a lot of software they don't have to pay for. I can't be too critical of this--I like the idea of having a lot of software I don't have to pay for, too.
But I don't think that the perception of a "we won't pay for it if there's a free alternative that's kind of close" attitude being rampant in the Linux community is a harbinger of the impending death of shrinkwrap software. But it might be a sign of why commercial companies doing personal and "workstation" software probably aren't going to get real enthusiastic about Linux. We'll see commercial offerings from companies that expect to be selling support contracts, or that are looking at their Linux products as loss leaders; beyond that you see companies expecting to make money entirely from services (like Eazel and Helix Code, who despite being "partners" seem to be developing the same service model, which could lead to much hilarity down the road--but we digress).
There's a couple exceptions out there, like ApplixWare, and of course Night Of The Living Corel. But they're going to have to not merely be better than their free counterparts, they're going to have to virtually blow them out of the water, with reasonable pricing and enough unduplicated features that a reasonable percentage of the audience wants them. And that'll be increasingly difficult. (I'm more impressed by AbiSource's ambition than their product, but Ted--which doesn't get the recognition it deserves--absolutely rocks.)
This does beg a question. How does a company that's selling personal software, rather than the support for the software, make money in the Linux world? This isn't just an idle curiosity; some people think Linux is going to lead the world into a software renaissance, and while that's not impossible, there needs to be space for cottage software companies to actually make money and take off. So far the only ones that have done that seem to be ones that are selling Linux itself. Will AbiSource, for example, ever make money? That seems to be their goal, but nobody needs a support contract for a spreadsheet program--and by choosing to be GPL, they can't take the Ghostscript route of being "free for non-commercial use" and charge business licenses. (This would seem to me to be a workable approach, but some would argue--with justification--it's not in the spirit of open source if you have a commercial limitation like that.)
Should not use TeX as an intermediate format. TeX creates nice output, but it needs a complete rewrite to get rid of static data structures, and make the error messages human readable. Everyone who has used TeX for something useful has made major modifications to TeX to make it processes his/her particular document (changed 20 constants in a config file or recompiled the package). It amazes me that Donald Knuth has kept his guru status, when the second most known piece of work he has done is TeX ... It certainly tells something about how excellent his most known work is (yes, it is excellent, this is not a flame).
Having written a 200-page technical document in LaTeX (I wish I'd known about LyX at the time!!) I'm afraid I don't share your view on TeX. Having put my document through the ringer, generating indices, tables of contents, multi cross references and three layers of sectioning, interspersed with multiple diagrams in multiple formats, I just did not have to fiddle with the base package at all. Armed with Leslie Lamports guide to LaTeX, there were no obscure error messages and any formatting decisions it made were logical, even if they weren't entirely what I intended. In the few cases where you get the infamous all-the-images-at-the-end-of-the-chapter problem, it just took a little rethinking and some coaxing in the LaTeX (not the C code) to get it where I wanted it.
And just in case I had a tweaked copy on the Solaris cluster I was using LaTeX on, I got identical results on my Linux box with the same files.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
2-3 years ago, I was facing this difficult choice for writing my thesis: LyX wasn't quite there yet, staroffice (still from stardiv at the time) looked good but wasn't quite there yet either, and everybody else in the lab (99.9% of the people) were complaining about all kinds of problems in office97, or from migration to one system to another (one guy managed to go nearly all the way through from 2 to 2000, but it took him a lot longer than anybody else to get his PhD ;)...
WYSIWIG is great for short documents... something you manage to write in a few minutes and can still handle the layout of.
Anything bigger than a few pages, a few dozens of cross-references to sections, equations, figures, citations and word pukes. It doesn't do it straight away, though... but slowly at first and giving-up more and more errors as the document grows.
Then when you want to print to another printer that isn't the one you wrote your document for, the layout and page breaks go all over the place. This Isn't Normal.
I remember having had this discussion on /. at the time and several people advised me to move to LaTeX.
Sure I was shit scared to do anything the size of a thesis in TeX... need to compiling documents before you can see them, limited xdvi viewer, no spell checker... all in all LaTeX isn't very appealing for the new user.
But think about it this way: A 200page document is quite a big project. If it were a big programming project, would you rather rely on a limited point and click tool somebody who doesn't understand shit about the stuff you're really doing, or would you rather do it yourself with a powerful language like c, c++... insert your favorite language here.
There you go! and you don't expect the learning curve to be easy either, do you?
So yes, it was quite a difficult move for me, but fortunately, there are good documents on the net... just grab a copy of epslatex.pdf from a CTAN mirror and The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e.
The most amazing thing about LaTeX is very simple: It's Open. This means that any part of your document, you can generate yourself from your programs. Need to generate a table with figures? just do it.
The same thing goes to two other programs I extensively used: grace and xfig. Yes they have somewhat limited interfaces, but you can generate the data from your own programs, so who cares about the interface?! they have open and well documented formats, it's the only thing that should matter.
For spell checking, I used aspell, again, who cares about real-time error correcting when you can do it in one go near the end?
For the editor, I don't know what you usually use, I use vi (improved :) and it works great. Use whatever you want.
Okay, I probably should stop being a LaTeX zealot, just think about it. Okay, you wouldn't start writing c++ code to just rename a few files... that's why bash is here for. The same way, to quickly produce a dirty document, wysiwyg is handy... but anything bigger than a few lines of code and you'll start to feel limited if you stay in bash instead of going for c/c++... same with documents... And when the program you're using is Trully Open, then you don't depend on The Big Corps who don't give a shit about you, just your money...
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"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
If you're writing a letter to Aunt Sally, or any other short one-of-a-kind document, A word processor is the best solution. It's simple and lets you manage things easily. Ditto for HTML.
/newcommand to tell latex. One of these days, I'll put up some source code to tell people the most frequent uses&misuses of latex.
If you're writing a hundred very similar documents, or you have a thousand people collaberating writing documentation, Some type of structured XML is the best. It'll let you have a consistent look&feel, and it'll help avoid people shooting each others foot. It also lets you design the input language around the semantic structure of what you're writing. You amortize the creation of the DTD and software over the large number of documents/pages being written.
But, If you're writing documents that have a lot of semantic complexity (mathematics books, papers, etc.) but each document is a one-off, Latex tends to be better as a half&half. It lets you create some simple semantic structure in a powerful, flexible, and easy way. In a sense, you merge the presentation language with the semantic meaning. It doesn't divorice the two issues from each other like XML, but it puts in a distinction that avoids the micromanaging hell of word processors.
It all depends on the type of document you are writing, how many people are collaberating, and number of documents of that type that will be written.
(One good sign of LaTeX being misused is the use of 'eqnarray'. I've used latex for 3 years, written >400 pages in it, and never used it once. Ditto for vspace. If you have useful semantic structure, use
In fact its a challenge to the open source community. A FrameMaker clone outputting PDF. Lets merge it into the StarOffice suite.
Okay. E-mail me and we'll start drawing up specs. My forte is 3D visualization so I'm not the best person to do this but its got to start somewhere.
Lets take Frame Maker apart "at face value," list every presentation (aka: window, dialog box,) every button (aka: gadget, widget,) every menu item, draw up dialog descriptions (I have a diagramming technique to do this, I can email a copy of the article from the January 1990 issue of Computer Language Magazine, [it'll be on my site ASAP,]) and factor out an object structure to support all of the functionality.
By the way: PDF Good, closed spec.s BAD.
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