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

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 :))

Adobe Short Sightedness

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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.