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

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.