Adobe Frame Maker Equivalent for Linux?

Sim asks: "I currently work for a company which has used Frame Maker on SGI/IRIX systems for almost 10 years (meaning they have roughly 10 years worth of FM documents/reports/technical narratives/etc). It appeared that there would be a clean sweep of old SGI's out the door in favor of PC's running Linux, until a very nasty glitch got in the way: Adobe discontinued it's work on a Linux version of Frame Maker -- leaving the project in a beta format. The unstable format of the current Frame Maker version makes putting it into a production environment nearly impossible. I was hoping someone out there might know of a really powerful Frame Maker substitute."

"This substitute would need to have the following features:

• 'user friendly' GUI
• should be able to handle document management (with document cross refrencing links)
• graphics support
• import tables/create table
• handle multiple template styles (a style manager for creating templates would be wonderful)
• should be able to import/open .DOC formats as well as export/save to .DOC
• STABILITY

I've done some research on Star Office, as well as programs provided with a standard Red Hat install (koffice), both suites appear to be fairly unstable, and fairly buggy still. I've also researched LyX, but LyX doesn't have all the features I'm looking for. I'm open to any suggestions of a suitable Frame Maker substitute. I am willing to pay for the software -- just because I'd like it to run on Linux doesn't mean I expect it to be free."

Comments

StarOffice 6

[jilles]

I'm a framemaker user too and I am also looking for alternatives, mostly because I would like a better GUI without losing the features that motivated me to use framemaker.

Even though I'm in a win32 environment, ms word is out of the question for me. I've simply lost too much time recovering images, fixing severe layout issues and working around the many very annoying bugs this word processor has (anyone who has ever tried to keep a figure caption under a figure knows what I'm talking about, it is possible but requires several non trivial measures). I became a framemaker user after word automatically rearranged my master thesis, throwing away all images in the process. That was the last one in a long range of time consuming incidents.

Framemaker doesn't have such inconsistencies. It sure has some strange quirks and severe useability issues but it manages to get the job done reliably. I've worked with it a lot and have learned to work around most of these issues.

I believe star office 6.0 could replace it. Right now it is probably too buggy but it hasn't been released yet. What's important is that it has an open file format (just like framemaker) so it is possible to create conversion tools, it has a reasonably friendly GUI, it is feature rich (including a db for literature references!!)and it's open source (meaning that the more annoying bugs get eliminated by annoyed users).

It's not the ms word killer many believe it to be since that would require much more features and polishing (like it or not, the ms word UI is a pleasure. If only it would work consistently). I'm hoping someone will write coverter for framemaker documents that will preserve a documents structure and crossreferences. Once you have that, the layout can be fixed in a relatively short amount of time so I don't care as much about correct conversion of that.

Re:StarOffice 6

[AtrN]

I'm a long time Frame user (12 years) and also desire either a Linux (really FreeBSD) FrameMaker (for real this time guys) or an alternative that is at least as functional. But there aren't any.

And before people say, no LyX is not an alternative, KWord isn't there by a long shot (although it's heart is in the right place) and StarOffice is too busy trying to be Word for my liking (I haven't tried 6, is it any different other than being in its own window?). $EDITOR isn't in the running for the type of documents you use Frame for.

The important thing is the structured approach to documents with, as you say, consistent formatting and a reasonable, though not great, GUI (Unix frame is better than Windows in this regard, the Windows one is pretty sucky). The Frame feature set is pretty good, or at least provides the types of things technical documents require. And it works, pretty much, reliably and consistently if a little quirky at times.

The approach taken by a lot of the people desiring the Linux version is to get a cheap Sun box and a multilicense install of Solaris Frame running with remote X sessions. The machine only runs Frame so doesn't need to be super fast, give it a bunch of memory and it should be happy.

There's opportunity here. To the comments that said this is another "re-ivent the wheel" it's only because Adobe don't seem to care too much about FrameMaker. The feature set and approach to document formatting suits many types of technical documents far better than typical "word processors". People who do these types of documents and have experienced Frame mostly agree there is no current alternative. But it doesn't get advertised along with their other stuff in the things I see, they try hard to pretend there isn't a version for Unix and some annoying problems have persisted for years. People (like me!) are crying out for a GUI-based, document preparation system for technical documents and others that require reliable formatting, integrate graphics, footnotes, tables, want an index, TOC, LOF, etc... We don't need talking parrots. Just copy Frame and add some biblography support to it :) May be fix some of the other stuff too (reference pages, uggh, process the Frame data structure and you'll realise). Oh, and the types of people who really want a tool like this pay $$$ for it. We depend on it, which is why we don't use Word (Word Perfect sucks too :))

Consider XSL:FO

[GeneOff]

I recommend moving away from proprietary formats altogether. This trend is only going to continue. First a very good doc prep software paackage is released but in closed source form. For years, companies use this data format to represent all their internal stuff. The vendor continues to provide support. Then a sea change occurs and the company moves off dying legacy hardware to open stuff on commodotity h/w (Linux on Intel/PPC). However, this platform is not supported by the vendor

Or perhaps the vendor closes its doors. On the other hand, if the company had its source material in XML and used standard presentation languages like XSLT, XSL:FO they wouldn't be tied to any one particular vendor or platform.
XSL:FO can be used to output to a wide variety of formats, including mif, pdf and LaTeX.

I realize this is nearly the same as suggesting it is a good idea to lock the barn door after the fact. But the advantages fo changing to this methodology outweigh the initial cost, IMO. The federal gov't had this same problem 30-40 years ago and came up with SGML as the solution then.

Adobe Short Sightedness

[4of12]

My organization is in exactly the same situation.

We've been running Framemaker on Sun's for about a decade.

Due to the superior raw price performance of the x86 platform, we will be moving to Linux over the next year.

We'd love to have Framemaker for Linux and would gladly pay for it. Many people feel it represents a superior offering for WYSIWYG document preparation compared to Microsoft Word, for example.

Unfortunately, it looks like Adobe is deliberately eroding its customer base for Framemaker on UNIX by not supporting Linux.

I expect our users will run Framemaker over the network via X windows from Sun servers if they really need it. Meanwhile, they will also probably start experimenting more with MS Word under VMWare (which connects well with Office Bees in the rest of the corporation), or try StarOffice 5.2 and, later, 6.0. A trend of the number of Frame users at our site decreasing year by year will continue and possibly accelerate as a consequence of Adobe's reluctance to bring out a Linux version of Frame.

Ever since they got bought out by Adobe I've had the impression that Framemaker is being managed in a short-sighted way. Either that, or there is a "bigger picture" with the rest of their products, etc. that I am missing.

However, with MacOS X, perhaps there's some hope that someone will see that "multiplatform support" in the UNIX world is no where near the bugaboo they fear from their years of experience with "multiplatform support" meaning Windows+Mac.

We'll do our migration to Linux with or without Adobe. Whether we do it with or without Framemaker several years from now is entirely up to them.