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Adobe Kills FrameMaker for Mac
Feneric writes "As noted on FrameUsers.com, FrameMaker for the Mac was officially killed by Adobe. Of course, since one of the primary selling points of FrameMaker is its wonderfully solid cross-platform MS-Windows / Macintosh / Unix support, many are now wondering how long it'll now last for any platform."
"[...] many are now wondering how long it'll now last for any platform."
I think the real question is "how long it'll last for any platform other than Windows?"
Sad.
Trolling is a art,
Truly cross-platform, professional page layout, incredibly smart fonts and free! Stop chaining yourself to proprietary shit that can get killed any day.
Now the trolls, that's another matter...
As cool as it is too see major software being released for multiple platforms, especially linux. Something like this is going to happen. Just a few weeks ago, Macromedia announced that it was going to support linux. Now adboe is dropping a mac product.
So lack of a 7.0 to 7.1 update for Macintosh at this moment equates to it being killed?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Adobe never actually updated FrameMaker for OS x on the Mac, which made this a legacy app that needed to run in Classic anyway. Print shops can be somewhat slow in updating to newer software and technology, so many might still run some OS 9 Macs...but lack of support for the current system hinted that this software was considered dead long ago.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
I haven't heard anyone say they are using Framemaker for serious development of anything in years.
I wonder if they got tired of all those 'If runs on OS X, why don't you have a Linux version? They're practically the same thing!' questions.
- Tash
If they sold it for $99, they'd probably make more money.
For those of us not members of Adobe's forums.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Doesn't everyone already use Acrobat when they want to hang their target users machines.
So....does that make it "Abandonware"?
and the idea of a special app for making frames - that's completely nuts. adobe should have done this years ago.
sulli
RTFJ.
Can anyone say: Final Cut Pro payback?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
...that Adobe has puchased a competitor and then killed off the competing product. Didn't they do the same thing with PageMaker?
In any case, it would seem difficult for a company to justify splitting its development resources between two competing products. FrameMaker users surely must have (or should have) seen this coming.
"Buried" would of have been more appropriate. Why would anyone use FM in this day and age? I mean you have InDesign on one hand and word processors with more advanced futures on the other. What is the benefit of using that program? Aeons ago I was told by someone on a sun box that is was useful for large documents. Is that still the rationale?
-_-
I spent the last 6 months of my life buried in that app, and while I think it's wonderful for what it does, I was getting pretty sick of the Classic environment crashing twice a day. (thank God for auto-saves) It got to the point that I'd prefer running it through VirtualPC and Win2k than under OS9--the only problem being the need for dual displays to manage both the workspace and the palletes. Oh well, here's to hoping that either LaTeX + good GUI or InDesign + PageMaker extinguishes the app in the near future...
I hate Grammar Nazi's
Adobe is a company that needs to make money to survive (like all companies). If a product isn't selling well enought, it will get killed.
So the fault isn't squarely on Adobes shoulders in this - the particular segment of the market that Framemaker for Mac catered to just isn't big enought for the software to keep selling...
On the lighter side, this must be a wonderfull opertunity for the Open Source Software to show that it can deliver somethign just as good for the Mac, right?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Never really heard of anyone using FrameMaker, but most of these large production-grade applications out there have open-source equivalents that are as good if not better. Even if Adobe was to drop Mac upgrades/support for Photoshop (read, suicide) -- you can always run Gimp instead.
huzzah
Abobe's official FAQ can be found here in pdf format.
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I hear a BSD port is in the works.
I'm not disappointed, I hate using Frame.
Komi
The ultimate goal of science is to unify all forces of nature to a single law that can be silk-screened onto a T-shirt.
Isn't it the case that Acrobat is pretty much killing FrameMaker. I'm not saying that it's a replacement in every case but people are using Acrobat.
That FrameMaker has been killed on Apple clearly means it's sales there much be utterly miniscule because the incremental development for that platform should be relatively minor.
since one of the primary selling points of FrameMaker is its wonderfully solid cross-platform MS-Windows / Macintosh / Unix support, many are now wondering how long it'll now last for any platform.
Yes, they've just dumped 3% of their market share! They're doomed!
I don't actually think I know a production professional who uses Framemaker - although it is not bad for BIG documents. Clearly Adobe is putting its weight behind Indesign it is battle to dislodge the (in my opinion) excorable Quark Xpress.
Frame was a good app, but it was also a niche app, as it was really only good for long document publishing [books]. That said Indesign and XPress own the much larger magazine and newspaper publishing arena. Adobe just realized that they weren't selling that many copies of the application on the Mac side, and decided to drop it.
The Solaris version may continue to survive, as some RIPs are still running on Solaris, and it is helpful to have the app on that platform [and they can charge *much* more for each seat... take a look at what Adobe charged for Photoshop on SGI/IRIX and compare it to the Mac/Win version].
It is always sad when a large company drops a product for an OS, but if the audience isn't there, why bother? Smart move on Adobe's part.
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
wonderfully solid cross-platform MS-Windows / Macintosh / Unix support, many are now wondering how long it'll now last for any platform
Isn't Unix what powers OS-X? I'm no specialist of the Mac word, but it seems to me that if something works on Unix, it has a fair chance of working under OS-X/Mac too, no?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
A bigger question for Framemaker user currently on Mac is do they qualify for the next upgrade version, transitioning from Mac to Windows?
Macromedia has done a great thing in packaging MX2004 with both Mac and Windows versions in the same box -- I can upgrade any of my systems -- mac, or windows -- and use the software on the fastest box in my studio.
Software makers have been telling us for decades that hardware is a commodity and software is what's important. It's about time that the liscensing model changes to reflect that.
This is a great chance for Adobe to do just that. I hope they do.
How is this offtopic? It's a legitimate opinion of the consequences of the events detailed in the article. While "troll" could concievably be applied, as the post attempts fearmongering and doomsday prediction, Offtopic is out of the question.
It never ran on OS X.
Windows or Solaris only.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
And while feature parity might indeed be equivalent between the apps on either platform, I've run in to a few pretty frustrating cache overflow, GID and system hang problems on Windows versions of Illustrator and PS that reminded me why 'real' designers use Macs >:D
I hate Grammar Nazi's
They already killed off Adobe Premiere as "Final Cut Pro payback"
this is just Adobe sucking ass to Microsoft.
Take this as a sign. It is not going to be discontinued, as in never see the light of day again. Instead, it will likely be integrated into the next package Adobe decides to release.
Adobe had promised before that that ``all major upgrades'' will be Mac OS X native.
Unfortunately, Lighthouse Design, the company which ported FrameMaker 2 and 3 to NeXTstep got bought by Sun, so Adobe didn't even have that option of outsourcing the port.
For those searching for an alternative, LyX, http://www.lyx.org is _very_ nice, esp. the nifty new QT version for Aqua.
There's also a script to convert from FrameMaker's Maker Interchange Format (MIF) to LyX.
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~pablo/mif2lyx/
InDesign lacks the industrial-strength SGML stuff w/ FrameMaker has, so isn't an option. Pagemaker has also been buried (but at least InDesign is a viable alternative for it w/ the nifty script pack / additions Adobe announced recently).
xmltex is another good thing to use, or of course one can roll one's own XML publishing solutions w/ TeX.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Yeah! Really bad.
Oh the pain.
Apparently Adobe's strategic plans are being
made by technically incompetent people who
do not understand that OSX is a variant of
Unix (in the API compatibility sense, rather
than the trademark sense).
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I've been a Framemaker user for over 12 years and it has not really progressed much in the last 6 or so. They glommed on some html export and XML support, but never saw much use for these features.
Framemaker was ideal for producing technical documents which require:
* paragraph style numbering, so that sections may be shuffled and all the numbered chapters, headers, subheads would automatically update
* incremental table and figure numbering
* cross-references, table of contents and figures which automatically update
* variables embedded in text
InDesign would be an excellent substitute if several of these features were implemented. I guess I'll have to keep the old version of MacOS9 Framemaker around until someone comes out with a substitute for this product.
"You have liberated me from thought."
Are you kidding? Adobe may release their programs from Windows as well, but let's not forget that Macs are still the standard in design. Even many businesses, big and small, choose to use Macs because a network of Macs is a hell of a lot more stable and secure than a Windows set up. When's the last time you heard of a Mac-based business getting hammered by a virus? When I was a sysadmin for a small business (25 Macs) I didn't even allow our one Windows box near a network drop, just to avoid the temptation someone might have to plug it in. Apple's desktop business is highly profitable to them, because many people will pay that extra money for the inherent bonuses that come in using Macs. Everything is not "equally good" on Windows. Trust me.
IAALS.
Christ, I hope they axe it for windows too. I'm occasionally forced to use that kludgebox. Try importing a pdf file into it. A. page. at. a. time. Anything beyond basic usage requires training because of the hacked-together senseless interface. It has produced some of the most arcane errors I have ever seen, including my favorite: ----- File cannot [OK] [Cancel] -----
In conclusion, thank God.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
First you don't update FrameMaker for the Mac in two years, then you complain Mac sales are going down and now you kill it. Uh, if you updated it more often maybe people would buy it.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
Being a 'real' designer for years now, on Windows none the less, I have never run into cache overflow, GID or system hang problems on either Illustrator or Photoshop.
FrameMaker is a really good document processor, I've used it on AIX, Solaris and Mac, but no document processor, not one, is worth $800 per seat. Good riddance to bad rubbish. There are other document processors out there that are equally good, and some are free.
The heat from below can burn your eyes out
From the Adobe Framemaker FAQ on the article "A. It is our policy to not comment on the size of our user base. However, sales of FrameMaker licenses have been greater on the Windows and Solaris platforms for a number of years." They spelled it out and no tinfoil hat conspiracy.
You may never see Framemaker on an open source platform. The primary use for Framemaker is technical documentation for publication. Some of the deadtreeware available for open source project certainly was composed in Framemaker. However, the majority of open source projects are not at the stage (and may never be) where someone makes the effort to publish documentation.
And then remember a large number of Framemaker users work as software technical writers for closed source software companies. So do not hold your breath for the free software version.
Framemaker is one of the few pieces of software, open or closed source, that paid more than lip service to XML. A structured Framemaker document is a pure XML document with a real DTD. So not only is it well formed, but also (*gasp of disbelief*) Valid!
Have you Meta Moderated t
all the posts say that Apple is expanding market share like gangbusters. Someone's wife takes the Mac to work, a virus hits, a week later, the janitor, the guy selling chewing gum in the lobby, and the washroom attendent are all showing up with Macs.
If Adobe had a version of the app for older Macs, and market share is growing, why aren't they supporting newer Macs? Don't they understand, as one poster pointed out, that even though Google share was 4% in 1991 and 4% now, that market share could have grown from 3.51% to 4.49% and still show as 4%? What are they, stupid?
Maybe they see something else growing at a 90% rate year over year, and whose growth rate is accelerating, and are getting ready.
Their "Unix" version was a Solaris binary. Good luck getting that to run on OS X.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
I don't know how important this application is and what kind of market does it aim to. A glancing look suggests it's some kind of templating environment for bureucratic ePaper-shifting; should that be the case it's understandable that Adobe would focus on MS platform given that the totality of corp desktops is Windows. Now, if IBM/Novell's strategy to deploy Linux on those desks works out we'll have a metric of Adobe's MS-shill-ness (wait for the new Office to include these capabilities and bite Adobe in the ass... have a smile, relax). :-)
Sadly, I've seen profs writing books in FrameMaker so this decision could hurt Apple academic sales (but after the Big Apple cluster stunt that'd be difficult
Finally, what is the product to fill this void on OS X platform?
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
The first one was, of course, Adobe Premiere Pro, which was probably a response to Apple's very strong Final Cut Pro experience.
I don't think that similar app on the Mac side that does this, but do many people really use FrameMaker more than other tools?
fyi, Wiley & Sons Reference Publication department heavily uses Frame for its projects. They've gotten the styling guidelines and app file management down to a science. That's just one pretty significant Frame client.
I hate Grammar Nazi's
...so this doesn't bother me very much.
Approximately 2 years ago, I emailed them asking for an opinion on th DMCA and never got a reply. This was a time when anti-Adobe feelings were running fairly high here on slashdot. I emailed again, this time less politely stating that I would boycott their products if they didn't respond to my simple query.
Well, I was true to my word and as a result of this they've directly lost out on several thousand dollars worth of license fees for photoshop and illustrator alone.
(And, this also means we have one less reason to continue maintaining windows machines, but that's another story).
more than paris hilton in a 200M avi
I haven't heard anyone say they are using Framemaker for serious development of anything in years.
That's because FM is not a general-purpose Joe-and-Jane office worker word processor: FM's strengths lie in really large documents, like books and other things that are over ~200 pages. Not many people have a need for that. FM on Solaris (SPARC) is a very nifty combination.
You and your acquaintances are not a statistically significant sample set.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
Abandonware has nothing to do with whether the source is available.
For all your ad packaging needs there's now adboe.
Anyone care to recommend a frame-based stable, "no-bullshit", and all-around "good" docs editor?
Free is cool of course but not strictly a requirement*. Also - don't say TeX - I seek something that I can also recommend to cow-orkers and "normal" people, like... well, economics or law students.
*: anyway - what's the use _for_me_ from SO's (EG) source if it's a royal PITA just to download them in this part of the world, say nothing about compiling.
Why kill it , when you could GPL it (keeping existing customers happy) and make some new friends in the process?
tut tut , selfish swines!
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
This just goes to show how important open source is.
You have one company decided when, how, and why your using software. I just hope that the development community decides to make a new editor/format to replace PDF (insert any format you see appropriate) and make it better.
This way no company can say that you can no longer use this format. The community decides when they will stop using the format. Adobe has taken the decisions out of your hands.
Think back to two years ago: do you think perhaps Adobe was swamped with DMCA-related questions?
Where exactly did you send your query? To a person or to a {help|info|webmaster|etc}@adobe address?
Was your question a FAQ? Did you bother to check?
To recap:
you sent email to a huge company
you didn't get a reply
feeling slighted, you sent a "less polite" email threatening to "boycott their products"
for some amazing reason, you didn't get a response to the second email
you took all this personally, and now are waging jihad against a company that doesn't know/care about your [alleged] lost business
Wow.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
"Everything is not "equally good" on Windows. Trust me. "
And everything is far from good on mac.. sure one or two things may be questionally better. Thats as far as it goes. Do not trust me on this, as these are facts.
Unless and until Adobe kills the Unix versions of FrameMaker, there's a Mac-usable version out there.
This saddens me, though. I'm a technical writer and can't imagine having to do books with Microsoft Word. Word is not suitable for long technical documents, period. It *breaks* when you try to do complex things with it. I'm planning to switch to a Mac with my personal computer, and just hope that I won't be reduced to running FrameMaker under a Windoze emulator.
Catherine
Long-term, OOo is going to offer fierce competition for any product like Frame, and even MS Office. OOo already has a FrameMaker type of document model. By using an open XML fileformat, it means that it will be possible to write tools that interact with OOo documents easily. It will probably end up with a more powerful templating system than MS Office, and it will definitely end up with more powerful macro options (Python, etc). OOo will also win in cross platform abilities, with native ports to OSX and KDE in various stages. OOo is the one to beat these days. MS Office will always have a niche in processing of legacy documents, but it and FrameMaker, PageMaker and the others are in trouble.
Frame is the tech writing industry standard for anything bigger than what Word can handle. If you're going for any tech writing work of consequence, you'd better be handy with Frame.
Unfortunately, tech writers seem to march to the Microsoft drummer in general. I doubt many will care about Frame for OSX.
Ever hear of the United States government? A good deal of their documentation is created in Framemaker.
SharkJumper
Good for you, man. Wish I could say the same :P
People who use Macs for layout and publishing are generally not hobbyists and are usually using Quark or even *gasp* Adobe's InDesign.
;-)
Just like with Premiere.. people who are using Macs for video production are generally a bit beyond the consumer/student/tinkerer level (ie: Avid, FCP, etc) and Premiere on Apple really only fits that hobbyist niche (if you claim Premiere/Pro is a production-competent nle you either have 0 professional production experience or you have really low expectations, sorry).
This isn't that big a deal; there are better products for the platform and Adobe is cutting off dead weight and conserving it's bottom $.
$.02 (but not about that Premiere bit..
Underneath OS X is BSD. But the UI is different. Solaris provides X/CDE/Whatever as it's GUI. OS X uses something else, though you are able to add X to OS X to get it running.
It's kinda like saying that a KDE app should work under Gnome with a few tweaks and a recompile because they both run on Linux. Different API's alltogether though. (okay...bad example, but best I could think of)
So, in theory they should be able to port it to X on the Mac, but is probably more trouble than it's worth for them.
Oh jeez I think I'm gonna be sick. From now on, I'll leave the trolling up to the ACs. My eyes just started bleeding.
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
It's obvious from the majority of the comments that most of the people commenting on this have never actually to use FrameMaker for anything.
If you are a Tech Writer or working in desktop publishing firm (the type that issues books rather than newsletters) in any serious capacity, chances are good that you've at least run across Frame, and if you are like me, use it pretty much on a daily basis.
I started using the Unix version first, prior to it being bought out by Adobe, sometime in the mid-90s. I've written books for a book publisher that ultimately *had* to be in Frame format, and many tech writers I know use it. So the fact that it has less than 1% market penetration isn't surprising -- it's always been a niche product.
What I don't find surprising is the fact that Adobe is dropping support for the Mac platform. I came back to Frame 7 recently and was surprised to see how little had been changed since the last time I used it extensively back in the late-90s. While Adobe *has* made some improvements to the product (primarily to just barely keep it usable in the Internet age), but it still has one of the worst UIs going for a commercial product. Embarrasing-looking 8-bit graphical buttons that make the product look cheap, multiple dialogs needed for handling a single task (such as table formatting), and the fact that pretty much anything of use besides basic text formatting is lumped into a single "Special" drop-down menu. And you have to love the dialogs whose windows you can resize without actually resizing the window's contents, which smacks of poor QA. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't curse Adobe for making the barest UI improvements to their product. So to me the announcement about dropping the Mac platform says that Adobe is continuing to neglect this product.
What it does it does well, but increasingly the headaches of the poor UI and the fact that you have to get plug-ins to do what ought to be built-in functions (decent indexing comes to mind; I can buy a good product from IxGen but why has it never been built into Frame?) leads to more frustrations that is necessary for a product that commands a premium price (currenly $799).
I am in a position to make recommendations on software purchases, and unless Adobe becomes serious about its upgrade to Frame (the 7.1 "upgrade" for $199 was laughable) I wouldn't recommend we continue with this product. Give me something that works cleanly in XML, indexes well, with tie-ins to a database structure, that produces decent HTML output and handles markers, variables and all of the "special" functions that Frame builds in and I'll sign up for it in a jiffy.
FrameMaker is very good for long document production (b&w pages) where as InDesign and Quark are good for short full color printing like book covers, brochures and advertisements.
I work for a publishing company in an OS X 10.2 & 10.3 environment. We publish long documents to print and to the Web, therefore FrameMaker would be the best tool because of its rich support of XML. Because of our Mac hardware investment, it is too costly to migrate to Wintel to use FrameMaker. We used to run Quark in the 'Classic days' and now use InDesign --we wanted an OS X native DTP app 2 years ago.
Even with Quark 6 & InDesign CS XML enhancements, they still don't compare to FrameMaker.
We were hoping for a OSX native version of FrameMaker, but now I am resorting to hope future versions of InDesign will include all of FrameMaker's XML features.
FrameMaker has been the number one tool for technical writers for years. It could be replaced by something like LaTex, an infinitely better system, but the amount of time to convert all templates and libraries and create new ones is massive. Also, the amount of training most TWs would require to learn something like LaTex is also a hurdle. I did a contract recently for one of the biggest computer manufacturers, and their whole library (thousands of books) is in Frame. Tech writers on average don't tend to be really technical, and the loss of FM would have some big reprecussions.
In other words, the patents on the things you want to do with digital prepress image processing are patented (such as pretty much anything dealing with spot color), and you can't afford to wait out the patent term, right?
Macs have traditionally had a bunch of different word processors/desktop publishing utilities. This would just be one of many options for them.
This is one of a very few (WP/DP) programs specifically for Solaris (for those who don't think of Tex as easy to install/use). Thus, even though there are more installed Macs than Solaris workstations, they may well have a bigger Solaris market.
The thing that confuses me is that now that Macs are BSD based, shouldn't it be relatively simple to port the Solaris version to MacOSX?
Answer: two mouse buttons and a slightly different keyboard.
Idiot.
My friend, you are whistling past the graveyard. The day when "all" design shops forced people to cater to their Mac-centric environments is long gone, and good riddance. PCs are much cheaper, and you don't need a gaggle of Macinista drama queens to work on them. Of course, some segments of the graphics community will only switch when their ludicrous one-button mouses are pried from their cold, dead hands, but those are the dinosaurs headed for the tar pits anyway...
Can we submit a petition to Adobe to not let this wonderful program die?
at least can they release the source code...
Can anyone shed some light on Adobe's UNIX-phobia?
On a related note, I like LaTeX, but it requires even more guru wizardry than Frame. LaTeX is good, but it is not a viable replacement for Frame. Somebody with a lot of knowlege and no life should create a Frame-like interface to LaTeX.
Anonymous Kev
Proudly posting as AC since 1997
(Finally got a dang account in 2004)
Too much of Latex's document design is prefabricated. It is completely unsuited for commercial print design -- books included.
The whole idea of TeX is to automate layout! Naturally it can't do the same work as a top-notch book designer laying out each page by hand in Quark or Pagemaker. A TeX-produced book will never win a Franklin award. But for everything short of that, it does an excellent job, with very little effort, and a huge labor savings.
Look at an O'Reilly book sometime -- the nicest looking computer books around. The beauty of TeX is that I can make my docs look *like that,* which is better than what my collegues can do with Frame. And it definately gives me a competitive edge. Not to mention the greater flexibility of DocBook source files, which can be searched, indexed, transformed, converted, etc.
I've always used PageMaker, Illustrator and Photoshop.
Photoshop, oddly enough, was not originally designed with the print industry in mind until John and Thomas Knoll from Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic had sold it to Adobe.
Adobe's definitely feeling a kick in the pants from Apple...
Apple's developers, being far more ingenious at developing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, has vastly improved acquired applications such as Shake and DVD Studio Pro.
As a result of an explosion in digital cinematography and editing, people with advanced programming skills are harder to find, and therefore there's a greater need for user-friendly, robust apps on the superlative media platform.
Adobe has been riding high on Photoshop for years, and I find that particularly interesting since neither was Photoshop their product (it was invented by Thomas and John Knoll, of Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic), nor was it ever marketed by Adobe for the purpose for which it was invented... digital matte artistry and frame-by-frame image correction in motion pictures.
Unfortunately, they haven't really delivered on other products...Newer versions of Premiere had odd compatibility problems with various DV cameras, various interface bugs, a very poor titling tool that crashes frequently... Premiere Pro seems a desperate attempt to recover market share lost to Apple's vastly superior Final Cut Pro, imitating almost every major feature set of Final Cut Pro that was conspicuously absent in the standard version of Premiere.
As for After Effects... That application's edge was trumped when Apple acquired Shake, which has been used in Oscar-winning productions for seven straight years, including [i]Lord of the Rings[/i]... Shake is such an immensely powerful compositing system, it commands a sticker price four times that of After Effects Production Bundle. It's clear that Adobe's reign in the film and television industry is at its end... which means "Game Over" for one of their two primary target markets. So my response, as a content creator using Macs exclusively, to this and future missteps by Adobe in an effort to differentiate themselves from Apple who has all but entirely annihilated Adobe's market share... is, to quote Bender from The Breakfast Club, "B-O-O H-O-O."
Cry me a river...
If Apple ever plans to massively overhaul MacPaint and turns AppleWorks into a full-blown publishing suite, Adobe might as well file Chapter 11.
I've been using Frame for about 5 years on Mac and Windoze: documenting software, writing scholarly papers, and some modestly-creative writing. Some of the things I have done I don't think I could have done in any other software. I know (La)TeX, I know OO.org, but I'd have bought Frame for OS X without hesitation -- I *loved* it.
TeX is wonderful, Knuth is a god. But try getting your support people to write doc & tutorials in it. And try thinking that a non-technical dissertation looks like it'll ever be publishable staring at that sort of markup, even if it is in a nice OS X GUI like TeXShop. If using TeX, however, I do like (the idea of) the Cocoa-app Bibdesk.
I'm hopeful for OO.org, but, well, I don't like it, not yet. Maybe it reminds me too much of my year using M$Word, maybe it's too slow, maybe that download took too long, or the project too seemingly amorphous. I also like the promise of things like the Pybliographer project and it's plug-in for OO.org.
What I use for (scholarly) writing now on OS X: Mellel. It doesn't have all of Frame's page-formatting features yet, but it seems to be on the right track with OpenType for broad language support. They seem really eager to ensure that those who like Frame and Nota Bene will be happy in their app. As for a nice writing experience on OS X most similar to Frame, this seems the best chance.
Is LaTeX or one of the other prertty TeX front ends available for Mac? If so, it's more powerful than FrameMaker anyway. A little Aqua loving poured on, and nobody will remember why they wanted Framemaker in the first place.
Oh no not Frame Maker? What's next Streamline? Face the fact Frame Maker is outdated and barely used any more, so what if they kill it. While they're at it why not get rid of Atmosphere, Dimensions, Graphics Server, Streamline (it's last update was like when 1980?), and finally shit or get off the pot and kill PageMaker. The fact is that Adobes titles are mostly shit, what's good is the best, but the rest just sucks.
(grabs random O'Reilly from shelf) Says it's done with groff. Now that's real UNIX Publishing -- talk about beating dry bones against the skins -- but that's why they wrote Unix in the first place.
What people here don't seem to know is that TeX was around when Frame was originally written, and FrameMaker (and InterGraph) still went on to dominate the Unix publishing market.
This is a bit like programming -- you can write code that is a load of "ugly hacks", or you can write sane, maintainable, clear code. Even if both do the same, the second approach is preferable for obvious reasons. Likewise, in typesetting you can achieve the same visual result with ugly hacks, or with a higher-level approach where you specify intentions and let the tool render them; in the ugly-hacks approach too many things are hard-coded and maintenance/expanding of the code is a nightmare (novices inevitably do that).
My point is that one can improve a lot more by studying the works of the experts as source, rather than as end result.
Is there an OpenSource Equiv.? I know OpenOffice handles pdf and can save them.. if we have something similiar for FrameMaker, let's dump ADOBE!
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= - The Celtic - =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
In 2002, Apple bought the German company eMagic and, overnight, dumped Windows users of Logic, a high-end music production software. Apple claimed exactly what Adobe is claiming today, that the Windows version of Logic is not commercially viable.
Is Interleaf still being developed? That was the standard WP/DP application for Solaris at a previous employer.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
I have been in production/pre-press since 1989, and in that time I have seen exactly one shop which was Windows-based.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
"industry standard" and "good" (or even "decent" are two very different things (Windows is "industry standard"...) Frankly, FM blows when it comes to collections of large documents all with multi-person content.
Who came up with that stupid idea of embedding the style definitions inside each individual document?
If you're serious, you need a real SGML-quality toolset (like Interleaf/Quicksilver, etc.)
Most of you don't even know what this software does, and you start bashing Adobe for discontinuing it.
First off Adobe creates new software ever few years and competes it against itself, then adds features form both to eachother and slowly makes a new product. Indesign is a more robust application and after creating the software and advancing it over several years with both pagemaker and indesign being available, Adobe is trying to really push people to switch to InDesign over Pagemaker, I imagine once more places make the switch you'll see Pagemaker support drop as well.
They did the same with Framemaker and InCopy. If you are using Framemaker still well thats the old software they've been trying to get rid of...InCopy is it's replcement and what you should be switching to and upgrading too.
Ave Molech Setting
Interleaf is not defunct, it just has a new name -- "Quicksilver". And it's still a killer product but I miss the Unix versions.
Well at least mac users will allways have LaTeX, which, if I understand the use of pagemaker from the rest of the comments, was made to fill the same niche, composing documents to print on dead tree...
If you never tried LaTeX, try it out, the output is very nice.
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
I have to wonder what the targets are for the Framemaker market is at this point. For technical publications, print has been DOA for five years. For consumer work, Quark rules.
Unless and until Adobe kills the Unix versions of FrameMaker, there's a Mac-usable version out there.
Others in this thread have claimed that in the context of FrameMaker, "UNIX" means a Solaris operating environment on SPARC architecture. Good luck emulating SPARC instruction bytecode on a PowerPC processor. Or good luck trying to negotiate Adobe into recompiling FrameMaker for Darwin.
Can someone tell me what FrameMaker does that In Design doesn't ?
(I'm familiar with PageMaker, InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat since I had to learn how to use them this past 2 months.)
I already know several cryptic languages, what's the big deal about learning yet another?
Emphasis mine to demonstrate your choice of words. Some might say, and I would be inclined to agree, that you subconciously chose 'yet' to demonstrate your exhasperation.
fs
Uh, check the colophon on your O'Reilly books --- most of them were done using FrameMaker.
They weren't even willing to reprint / update the one TeX book which they did publish (but it's on sourceforge now, look for _Making TeX Work_ by Norm Walsh, you know him, the comp.fonts FAQ / DocBook guy)
That said, it's a _lot_ of work to make nice looking books in FrameMaker, requiring a lot more hands-on, fussy, fiddly things than LaTeX / TeX requires.
William
(who has done books in both and far prefers (La)TeX)
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Is there any chance of a framemaker plugin for scribus? or is this just too incompatable? For instance, its not uncommon for several office apps to be able to import docs from other apps,..if all you want to do is be able to read certain documents then you're saddled with Windows,..Adobe should ask their frame-on-windows licensees, how many of them are running windows within VMWare!
Maintenance has been outsourced to Moscow State University in Russia.
Broadvision, which now owns Interleaf, seems to be a company that acquires defunct software products and supports them.
That lead to CDROM publishing...which very very quickly translated to web work. I have to wonder who is still doing print work for technical publishing.
I'm not the poster, but what I like about things like Latex and Lout is that they can be made part of a larger whole. What Latex does is at the near end of the processing chain. What about the other end? Idea processors anyone? And as everyone has pointed out Latex fits into the one tool, one job done well paradigm. Use the Gimp, or Sodipodi for your graphics for example, and subversion for version control. We're so use to the usually way that people have trouble thinking outside the box.
BTW There are GUI's for Latex on other platforms including Windows (and no I'm not talking about Lyx)
I'd be more interested in upgrading from Mac to Solaris. We don't have any MS-Windows boxes in our shop, but we do have a few Solaris ones. Has Adobe announced any plans to allow cross-upgrades to the Solaris verison?
This might be a small possible solution. KWord follows similar design principles as framemaker, maybe apple has the idea, to give the kword authors a helping hand :-)
At this point, only one thing comes to mind:
Ha... ha!
I'm tired of n00bfish who think they know 'what's up' in the publication industry :P
Print shop employee: "uhh why is this distilled doc embedded with broken PS level 2 TTF's?"
I hate Grammar Nazi's
So now that FrameMaker is gone & I want to stay Mac, what options do I have for OS X? I'm also curious if there are any programs on the Mac that can open a FrameMaker file?
Cross platform with the mac is NOT the primary selling point of the product. It hardly sells at all on the mac.
First the difference between FrameMaker, InDesign, and PageMaker.
PageMaker was created to provide reasonable desktop publishing primarally in B&W for simple books, light magazine work, and newsletters. It was a design with content type application.
InDesign, was created to compete directly with Quark, and is meant for design first and content later design. It utilizes AGM and CoolType (which are based on the PostScript Imaging model, and much more advanced than display PS), and the Photoshop Imaging model, which allows direct manipulation of Photoshop images. It is also truly OOP. It is by far the largest and most successful OOP program ever created.
FrameMaker, is a structured content oriented layout tool. The SGML model has been largely replaced by HTML, CSS and XML. The market is for very specific types of documents, that are largely created on UNIX and Windows platforms (mostly technical documentation, which benefits most from being able to re-layout the document).
The Mac platform, which is largely used in design oriented layout vs structure oriented.
Losing the Mac Platform is NOT that big of a deal. If you *NEED* this application, purchasing an appropriate platform to run it, is not unreasonable.
The truth is, FrameMaker is very important for a narrow application. It is still available for those platforms where that narrow need exists. And if there exists any sort of competitive need for structured layout on the mac, InDesign is flexible enough to build that on top of the InDesign imaging and layout engine.
I'm a Frame user but not familiar with InCopy. In going over Adobe's information on it, though, it doesn't seem to have the same sort of functionality that FrameMaker does. Adobe reps more typically try and push InDesign as the Frame replacement, but the two apps are really geared toward two separate camps.
"InDesign is killing Quark!" Yeah, sure. In your basement.
As an aside, the OS X Fiery RIPs are the first decent RIPs I have ever seen for those machines.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
...a volunteer effort that could die off/fork/etc. any day?
That "proprietary shit" stays alive as long as people have a demand for it.
Copyrights do not enter the public domain just because they are no longer commercially exploited or widely available.
Just because a party owns a copyright doesn't give that party grounds to sue using that copyright unless that party can show that somebody did in fact infringe that copyright. The fair use of a copyrighted work, as defined by Title 17, United States Code, section 117, is not an infringement of copyright. I can see how a non-commercial distributor of abandonware could make a case for clause 1, clause 2, and clause 4. And even if the copyright owner does win a close fair use case when the general public widely supports the alleged infringer, I can see how that would trigger widespread boycotts of the copyright owner's other products.
First they get rid of their publishing software, and now this?
Why don't they open source or public domain their software? They could simply have a single person 'manage' the open source project sites, sponsor the project by keeping a server for it (a minimal cost), or such. Then their name could live on by continuing to be associated with high-quality products - and they could conceiveably still sell the product with insignificant cost associated. Why not?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
- It wouldn't be a native OS-X application, using Aqua/Quartz/such;
- It more than likely was a Motif app on Solaris, and it's not obvious that that's readily deployable on OS-X without deploying a bunch of other software.
But you're certainly right about the rest; Solaris could readily be a bigger market for FM than MacOS.If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
I've written my phd thesis and master thesis as wel as several articles in framemaker 5.5 and 6.0. What I have since noticed is that adobe apears to have little interest in adressing severe issues (one level undo, a UI that feels out of place on any platform, various display bugs, lack of interoperability with office and open office). Basically, 5.5, 6.0 and 7.0 have been minor, incremental updates over 5.0.
A theory is that after aquiring framemaker and decimating the developerstaff that came with it, adobe has limited itself to bolting on some features (xml) to the increasingly obsolete core functionality which has not changed significantly in at least six years. Currently it is lacking many features that will very likely never be added simply because that would require changing the more or less black box like functionality from the pre adobe era.
For these reasons I stopped using it about two years ago now. I still have good hopes that eventually the openoffice people will pick up some of the better framemaker features (please implement crossreferences properly already, that would be a good start). Meanwhile I use ms word, which with some discipline (ok, lots) and knowledge of its many bugs can be forced to behave somewhat consistently for smaller documents (luckily a Ph D. thesis is a one time effort, I'd hate to do that in word).
Framemaker was a great product, with a unique featureset that to this day is basically unrivalled. For a long time it was the product of choice for any kind of technical documentation. But it is getting old and I deduce from the lack of updates from adobe that they are not interested in anything but minor updates to keep their existing userbase happy.
Jilles
Ventura Publisher. All you want and more. My god, if it's db integration you want, you'll be blown away by Ventura's DBPublisher.
However, I've moved to using ReST, DocUtils, and proprietary XSL:FO to create PDFs. It rules.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
It's pretty trivial to scribble notes over PS or DVI. MS Word does not handle book-sized documents very well at all, our are your PhD students just writting short stories for a creative writing class rather than a thesis?
...our thesis was written in MS Word. Not by my choice, but because I needed to pass documents back and forth between me and a guy using the uni computers = MS Word. It was a total of 218 A4 pages. Granted, we didn't piece it together until shortly before it was to be delivered (converted to PDF & printed), but it did work without any disastrous problems.
It did happen that Word did something incredibly wierd or locked up - but we always reverted to a normal version and tried again. We didn't find one reproducible bug (i.e. that it'll fuck up every time). The Sierra method is highly recommended though - Save early, save often (and to *different* savegames).
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
LyX --LaTeX for What You See is What You Mean Document Processing.
LyX 1.4 is coming along splendidly and is becoming much more intuitive, daily.
LyX 1.3.4 is excellent, flexible, extensible and quite intuitive with a buttload of Free Support from the LyX User List.
LyX for Mac is Qt compliant--Ronald Florence maintains the port. I'm looking into what it would require to do a Cocoa port but I can't imagine it would take much to do.
Try the damn software out. It is the one I use for writing Novels, Tech Publications, etc on Linux and OS X.
When I want to do Graphic Layout I'm using Scribus for Linux--growing better daily and quite useable with CMYK Color Separations, Secure PDF Exportations, etc.
Hell get smart and try Create! (Stone Studio). My friend Andrew Stone knows Document Publishing, Graphics Design and Layout. He even works with PStill Creator (PStill PS/EPS to PDF 256Bit Encrypted Conversion), Frank Siegert and has a wonderful PStill Utility for OS X.
If you can't grasp Create's Power than you've got issues
Free Upgrades for Life! Not to mention Andrew is one of the most talented, seasoned and professional individuals you'll ever speak with or meet. Great Company and Family. Highly respected since the early NeXT Days and now Apple Days.
Sincerely, Marc J. DriftmeyerFrameMaker maintenance has been outsourced to India as well -- good sign you'll never see another major release on any platform.
Adobe's site says it's some sort of WYSIWYG editor. I'm not sure what it is, so disregard if this question makes no sense, but could Framemaker be killed off because of the new version of InDesign CS? Perhaps they're just phasing one product out with another.
I don't know what Framemaker is used for, exactly, so maybe that's a silly question.
Adobe wants to kill mac support and almost did. Steve Jobs bought %10 of their shares in order to prevent this.
Adobe then tried to ask customers if they were willing to use Windows instead of MacOSX.
Photoshop today is run on Windows more then macs. Its not the 80's and 90's anymore. A few dire hird publishing companies only use macintoshes but its a small market and "Could" use Windows if Adobe forced them too. Fortune 500 companies have and or in the process of trashing macs because they want a unified platform to lower support costs. Its windows only and this and the internet market makes up the core of Adobes sales.
Web designers use IE and Windows.
The bottom line are development costs.
MS makes windows extremely proprietary on porpuse to make it expensive to have dual mac/Windows platforms. MFC was designed for that. You practically have to rewrite it from scratch for the mac version! All teh api's are different and low level things like mmx vs velocity are also a factor.
http://saveie6.com/
I still have a bunch of old FrameMaker documents that occasionally need to be printed, if not edited. But my copy of FrameMaker died a long time ago with my Windoze machine, and I'm not crazy about the idea of buying another one. Anybody know of a decent Frame->XML (or even ->HTML) converter? Preferably open source?
Use and distribution are two different things.
The statute states that fair use may include "use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by" section 106. Distribution is a "means specified by that section".
those aren't clauses they are factors.
Thank you. The proper terminology escaped me for a moment. But I do know that you don't need all four factors strongly in favor of the alleged infringer to support a finding of fair use. The fourth factor (does the use prevent the copyright owner from making money on the work?) breaks ties, and in the case of true abandonware (not in the case of FrameMaker because FrameMaker is still maintained on other platforms), the copyright owner has no longer expressed interest in making money on the work.
Abandonware sites have nothing to do with any of those [purposes listed at the start of section 107].
"The terms 'including' and 'such as' are illustrative and not limitative" (17 USC 101). Besides, wouldn't inclusion within a book about the program count as "comment", "teaching", or "scholarship"?
And just not publishing a new version does not mean that old versions are now abandoned.
Perhaps you have a point with respect to FrameMaker, as Adobe will still publish new editions for other platforms. However, where can I buy the new edition of some old game whose copyright owner has gone AWOL? Or now that I have acknowledged that it does not apply to FrameMaker, does this obligate moderators to slap my comments about the issue with (-1, Offtopic) moderations?
I respectfully suggest you stick to what you know.
What do you imply as the line between what I know and do not know?
I'm looking for insight from people who've used Frame recently. Does it still have a substantial lead over Word for handling large docs? People have written books in Word. How about free software like Lyx, Kword, etc - what does Frame offer over them?
Has Frame improved or stagnated under Adobe's stewardship?
My wife told me that her FrameMaker lists are saying this had a lot to do with moving FM development to India...
If Adobe had actually produced a Mac OS X version of FrameMaker in the 4+ years that Mac OS X has been around
You moron. You picked today to make a stupid comment like that?? I hereby declare daeley Ironic Idiot of the month!
Personally, at all the DTP related places I've worked as an admin - everyone moved away from framemaker quite some time ago to make room for other products.
This might just be my experience, but as I see it, this will be no critical blow.
Yep... Honestly, I have to say I lean towards the "Who cares about Adobe, anyway!?" camp. Frankly, they strike me as a little bit too arrogant for their own good in recent years.
Basically, Adobe is a company that developed several "standards" that everyone uses today, so they seem to think that warrants perpetual allegiance to their product line, no matter what the price or who the competitors are. When the competition gets too stiff for them, they just drop a product rather than compete.
The Mac community probably holds Adobe in higher regard than anyone else, simply because there aren't as many "big name" apps for a Macintosh, and products like Photoshop really helped define the reasons many folks bought their Macs in the first place.
But as both a Mac and a PC owner myself, I think Adobe's product line looks less and less enticing as years go by. Right now, the strongest card in their deck is probably their desktop publishing package. But even there, they "shine" primarily because Quark dropped the ball and took so LONG to finally release a QuarkXpress update for OS X, followed by pricing it too high and having too many copy protection hassles incorporated in it.
Most Photoshop users I see are getting the most usefulness out of 3rd. party plug-ins to the product. (And on the PC, many people can use Paint Shop Pro to fill 99% of their photo editing needs at a much lower price.) Plenty of cheap (or FREE) alternatives now exist to create PDF files from documents created in just about any application. For web development, Adobe GoLive is "ok" for some people, but many others could buy more suitable products for the job with that $395 or so it costs. We all see what happened to their video editing product already.... So that leave what "killer app" from them? Illustrator, maybe?
How long will Apple last if the only company making decent software for their platform stops?
"We all see what happened to their video editing product already.... So that leave what "killer app" from them? Illustrator, maybe?"
:)
How about PostScript? Oh yeah, Microsoft killed that off long ago...never mind...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Because Apple decided to completely undercut them with its own version of editing software.
The moment Apple starts producing something similar to Photoshop, goodbye photoshop.
Remember the mid-'90s when Apple was producing tons of things on its own, and everyone quit writing for the Mac? Remember how Apple touted "look, we have everything you might want" and everyone shouted back "variety please"?
Apple's re-creating the same road they went down before. It's only a matter of time. Watch their product base continue to dwindle.
In case you haven't been over to w3.org in a while, the HTML/XHTML standards are approaching the layout capabilities of FrameMaker. They're up against the Gecko engine, and the larger trend of dead-tree going out of style. Not that paper is dead, but you will probably skim electronic versions of anything before you want to carry around the paper version. There is additional energy cost associated with publishing on paper, and the cost of energy threatens to climb to 1973 levels. Electronic media reduces our dependance on fossil fuels for communication and information transfer.
I would guess this is news that Adobe FrameMaker is in "sunset mode." With Gimp coming up on PhotoShop's heels, the crops of Adobe bigots (the real value of the company) coming out of college may be in decline. Thus, Adobe may be in decline in a broader scope. Maybe they are going out quitely, and maybe they are circling the wagons. I'm sure there are hurt feelings regarding the iPhoto flap. The problem is: the only strategy Adobe has in fighting Apple is to lose.
Maybe Adobe is gearing up for a last-hurrah rewrite of the be-all end-all multimedia production suite? Then again, isn't multimedia so 1990s?
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Make it at least the third:
Acrobat Distiller Server is also not available on OS X!
One would think that that port would be easy as the regular Distiller already runs on OS X. What do they need to do for a server version besides changing their license agreement? But apparently they see no need for yet another app on OS X
You're wrong. Go to the store.apple.com and scroll down to where it says Power Mac G4. Click that to get to the product page that says "Mac OS X or Mac OS 9 boot-up capabilities." That machine is being sold, today, by Apple, specifically to a market that requires OS 9 booting. And it's on the Apple Store's front page.
And there are lots of other complaints: There is still no Linux version, the pricing is too high for it to become more commonly used, every installation seems to have a different set of fonts, each version has a new file format to be incompatible with the previous one, master pages and LOC/LOT/LOF formats are awkward to handle for new users, fmbatch still has the same limited set of features...
I'm sure Adobe will eventually succeed in killing this tool, just by neglect and greed.
As a long-time Adobe shareholder, that's good news for me.
It looks to me that Adobe has long ago decided to kill FrameMaker.
FrameMaker is very old. It has a Windows 3.11 feeling, and that affects a lot productivity. Dialog windows have an anti-conventional layout. Using undo/redo is often hazardous. There aren't enough keyboard shortcuts. Etc. Also, Adobe has released new versions of FrameMaker without fixing obvious GUI bugs and limitations.
Adobe decided to replace PageMaker with InDesign when PageMaker wasn't that old. But PageMaker had competition: Quark XPress. Without InDesign, Adobe would have lost credibility in the pre-press market.
FrameMaker has powerful features that we need to see in other products. It has sophisticated management table of contents, index, cross references. You can use variables and conditional text. Many comments in this discussion omitted that.
Don't even consider Ms Word and Ms Word clones. They are not optimized for productivity. They lack the features mentioned above. Ms Word is not reliable. Cheap word processors have very poor text justification quality. (Often you can see when a page has been printed with MsWord.)
I don't see InDesign integrating FrameMaker's features. InDesign is not a word processor. In InDesign, you have to explicitly link text from one page to another. Even though there is an automated way of performing this task, it is extra-work when you layout a 200-page manual.
It worries me that Adobe doesn't seem to have plans to replace FrameMaker.
Does anyone have any insight into Adobe's plans?
Side note: I think the only reason PageMaker is still alive is that it remains an easy way for Adobe to earn money. If only 5000 copies are sold every year, that's still $2,500,000 for Adobe. It makes it worth paying a few engineers to add new, but superficial features. Maybe the same thing is happening to FrameMaker.
I own an old version of FrameMaker for Mac, which I love and have used extensively. I started using FM when it was still sold by Frame Corporation, (of Rincon Circle iirc). It is the only app I still use in classic mode. I have written two theses in it for myself, and typeset one for my wife. I've written technical books, and non-technical books in it, as well as my day to day letters, wedding invitations, etc etc.
I was holding off buying a new version until there was one for OS X -- hence why I didn't go for 6 or 7. (Plus they didn't add any features I needed -- stagnation). At the same time, I was going to purchase a new copy for my wife (windows) and upgrade my dad's copy (mac), so we all moved into sync on the same version.
No mac version = adobe has lost my two upgrades and a windows sale. And all upgrades after that. I'm not going to fork between platforms, nor support a company that does not support my choice of OS.
I'm sick of using classic, but may have to continue doing so. Or migrate to a different tool.
Frame Corporation, please (i) if necessary, resurrect yourself or spin back out of Adobe and (ii) buy back the product and return it to the amazingly brilliant product it was before Adobe got its paws on it.
Some other points re previous posters -- ctrl-L fixes the redraw glitches. And a great FrameMaker feature is conditional text, which produces different versions of a document by changing variables, sort of like #if directives. I did Mac & PC versions of manuals using this. Change one condition, and the manual references, key refs and screenshots all switched over. Awesome.
Only gripe: being unable to break long footnotes across pages.
- The same language is used to mark up documents and to write extensions. A Turing-complete markup language with powerful macro-rewriting capabilities is a bad idea-- hard to parse, to start with. Using SGML for markup would be much better.
- The language is also pretty crummy for coding extensions. It would be far better if the system just provided an API that one could program to with various languages (I'd prioritize Python here, since it's easy for beginners-- though I'm a Ruby person).
- No namespaces. I edited and typeset a multi-author article collection in LaTeX, and one runs into the following problem: each author has their own modified version of the same hand-me-down macros, all of course with the same names; the identifiers in one package are always stepping all over those in another.
To be fair: TeX was designed over 20 years ago, and some of its design decisions hold up really well: the separation of block-based layout (TeX/LaTeX), font technologies (Metafont) and printing/display (xdvi) allows one to plug in new things into the overall system (Postscript and Truetype fonts, PS/PDF generation, etc.)Are you adequate?
Who modded this as Troll? It was a geniune question.
I'm not sure how it could even be interpreted as a troll. Adobe makes both Indesign and Framemaker.
Framemaker seems to be some sort of content creator, allowing you to use master pages and such. Indesign does this. Indesign CS has been expanded to include a ton of new features.
My question was whether all their effort was going to that, hence the reason for Framemaker being killed.
Uh, check the colophon on your O'Reilly books --- most of them were done using FrameMaker.
They've been done with various tools. That wasn't my point.
That said, it's a _lot_ of work to make nice looking books in FrameMaker, requiring a lot more hands-on, fussy, fiddly things than LaTeX / TeX requires.
Exactly!
I wrote my thesis using FrameMaker, and it saved my bacon multiple times. After having Word munge 5-too-many documents (~20 pages with 30-40 embedded objects), I decided enough was enough and I needed something designed for long documents. Although time consuming to properly create EPS files for embedding (linking actually) and setting up my paragraph formats, once it was working there was nothing that could touch it. In the end, my thesis was about 200 pages with 100+ references, oodles of cross-refernces, automatically updating Tables of Contents & Figures, close to 100 embedded grpahs & pictures, countless diagrams, a dozen tables and a small kitchen sink.
Doing it all over again, I might have used LaTeX, but Frame was very powerful and never left me wanting for more power. Plus, getting started was easy and, unlike Word, it remained stable even as I included more and more figures, etc. I'm convinced that I'd still be in grad school if I stuck with MS Word. I've vowed never to use Word for a complicated document again. In short, FrameMaker rocked.
I've been using Frame at various jobs (tech writing) for the past twelve years; it's really the clear best choice for any multi-chapter document, despite its many flaws and despite Word's increasing sophistication. Frame automatically handles (and updates) cross-references (giving you a great deal of control over exactly how they appear); it manages character and paragraph tags much much better than Word does; it provides mechanisms for displaying or hiding conditional text; it automatically generates indexes and tables of contents; it provides a system for managing all the chapter files that make up a book (continuous page numbering across files, for example, is trivially easy); it has a fairly powerful mechanism for designing page layouts (for books, not for things like ads) and managing text flows and so on; its system of using page-design templates works well.
Unfortunately, FM also has a lot of problems, as others have noted in various threads here. It has languished for the past several years, with updates coming out infrequently and with only minor additions to the software in each new update. It still has ridiculous UI problems that have been around as long as I've been using it; the lack of multiple levels of undo is probably the most glaring example of that, but there are dozens of other examples. The app has been showing its age for some time now, and a lot of Mac users didn't upgrade to version 7 because it didn't add much to the previous version and because we were expecting a future version to be OS X native.
I'm not familiar with Lyx and Kword, so I can't comment on those.
"Any platform," huh? Well, that was never true anyway, and it didn't last very long. Oh well, with the release of GIMP 2.0, Adobe will probably go bankrupt within the next week or so, so what difference does it make anyway...
That's just not true. Premier was never competition to Final Cut Pro, because it never even was in the same league. Basically all video editing apps sucked a big banana before FCP came out.
Pro's were using Avid and that's that. Then Apple came with FCP and Adobe got pissed? Because their 3rd grade product Premiere got declassified even more?
Everybody is bitching about how good competition for the market is, but once they get competition they start crying foul. What DO you want it?
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
I would suggest that the article doesn't have a reasonable frame of reference. I and another talented programmer produced a system that emulated a PDP-10 (mainframe) on a PDP 11/70 (minicomputer) with about a couple of months worth of work in the late 1970s. (I.e. we had program that ran on a PDP 11/70 that executed programs that were compiled to run on a PDP-10.) [For those of you not well versed in computer history -- a PDP 11/70 is a 16 bit minicomputer while a PDP-10 is a 36 bit mainframe. The instruction sets were quite distinct.]
So friggen what if Adobe decides to desupport a platform? Just build an emulator for what they decide to support. The computers are sufficiently fast now-a-days that you aren't going to notice the delay time involved in an emulator (at least if you did a reasonably decent job on it).
....as will Intel, Microsoft, and every other company on the face of the earth.
:-)
My only hope is that Apple waits longer than them to die.
I've got more mod points and GMail invi
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
Most of their products are written in MacApp Application Frameworks (as far as I can remember), then they wrote cross platform libraries to port their apps to other operating systems. That's why you get Mac looking dialog boxes, etc, regardless of platform.
Looking at the link to MacApp, it is no longer actively supported by Apple. Maybe this has something to do with it... but then again, if it did, it will affect Photoshop and all their other core products first developed on the Mac. Unless they have been working on porting the frameworks or something???
Anyhow, Frame is essentially a corporate product and corporations have not accepted the Mac to any great extent. It's used in graphic arts, prepress, etc. but most IT departments would rather avoid them. The Mac mostly sells to consumers and independent professionals.
Think of any company which produces any kind of visual content - web, cd/dvd, film, tv, print, advertising of all sorts. Any company which has invested in frame, and has lots of macs, is going to be bit put out by this.
FrameMaker ran exclusively on Big Iron because the makers of said Iron are its biggest customers, and want to keep it that way.
The question is, now that Frame is no longer on AIX or HP/UX, and both companies seem to be embracing linux, will they put pressure on Adobe in the opposite direction...
http://www.ragtime-online.com/
No Linux version (yet), but it's got a lot of capabilities.
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amen brotha'!
But even there, they "shine" primarily because Quark dropped the ball and took so LONG
Interestingly, relative upstart Quark is only where it is because Aldus dropped the ball on PageMaker for several years.
William,
What you said is extremely valuable to me. Your web site is interesting, too. I looked at the TeX link you gave.
Could you provide some more guidance? Is TeX as difficult to learn and use as one of the comments says?
Does TeX have tools for building indexes and tables of contents? Does TeX have conditional printing that depends on the value of variables at the beginning? Is there a way to use TeX to produce HTML, so that one file can be multi-purpose?
Then you must have been to one I was in. When I left that one we were running PM 6.5, Photoshop 5 and Illustrator 8 on Windows 98/2000. The platform wasn't a limiting factor on what went to our Heidelberg presses. However, our imagesetter was crap so we had to outsource for quality color separations because management wouldn't spring for a better imagesetter (ours was good enough for the rest of the work).
But at least that way I got lots of cool gifts from the service bureau we used.
Thanks for adding that in and clarifying the point I was trying to make.
"Napalm is nature's toothpaste" - Chef Brian
Thanks for all the details about TeX.
TeX is a Turing-complete programming language.
I'm glad you mentioned that. TeX is a programming language. I spent 30 minutes looking for front-ends for TeX, but I found nothing satisfying. Some projects don't even bother showing more than two screenshots.
Let's not forget about one of the most important features for a FrameMaker successor: the graphical user interface!
I think that creating an easy-to-use and yet powerful GUI for TeX can be as challenging as creating TeX itself. I'm convinced that TeX has all the features for text composition that I need, but most technical writers will need a nice GUI.
Apparently you aren't aware of the Politics that goes into the decisions of porting apps within Adobe.
Adobe hasn't wanted to budge on Objective-C even though they have written Objective-C for NeXT.
It's politically driven just as it was when they and a few other key developers strong armed Apple into creating Carbon.
Now that OS X is becoming entrenched that tactic is no longer viable and thus Apple doesn't give a shit because they will have a third party pick up the slack, or do it themselves.
If you don't think Apple can't produce a Framemaker killer you're nuts. It's a matter of necessity, not a lack of ability to do so.
William,
Are there GUI editors for TeX or LaTeX?
Maybe I should put that a different way. Are there any What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editors that display TeX files the way they will look when printed?
What about display postscript? Isn't it possible to convert a TeX file to Postscript, and then display it? That way the user would be able to see the result of any editing on the screen.
It's a bit daunting to think of working with a complicated file that could not be checked quickly.
you arent a fucking taxpayer you fuckheaded moron. you are a tax-leech. you do nothing, make no money and generate nothing for yourself or for the human race. you are a fucking useless pseudo-academic armchairing asshole from tim-buk-three and you suck at everything, know nothing and troll.
first off, where is here? how the fuck are people supposed to know implicitly where "here" is buttfuck?
and get this everyone. mister academia career academic prick is ADVOCATING MICROSOFT SOFTWARE. you flying fuck. you are a coverup fraud. you would advocate the use of INFERIOR tools to further obfuscate all your fraudulent NON FINDINGS LIAR!
JIHAD AGAINST THE LIAR!