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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."
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
I appear to have a blog. Odd.
On the Adobe page, click the FAQ link near the top of the page. It states within there Adobe's decision not to continue Mac versions of Framemaker, (Sales stopping April 21, 2004) plus support ending next year.
--- It's not my fault this post looks redundant. I just type too slow.
Abobe's official FAQ can be found here in pdf format.
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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
Several years ago, there was a beta version of Frame for Linux (I think it was a public beta). It went out to decent reviews, and then was abruptly killed. Although Frame was a bit of a nuisance at times, I used Frame extensively for word processing before OO.o and before I learned LaTeX, and my school was switching its SGI boxes to Linux boxes, and was looking forward to using Frame on Linux.
They actually had a beta for Linux. It worked flawlessly. But after the beta expired, they announced that it was dead. I actually still have a copy and can run it using an LD_PRELOAD trick to convice it that it's still year 2000 and not expired.
Yeah! Really bad.
Oh the pain.
While it is true that Aldus was the creator of PageMaker, Adobe bought out Aldus in the late 80s/early 90s. Dropping PageMaker 10+ years later isn't such a big deal, considering their new product InDesign was to take over the roll of PageMaker when it first came on the scene.
It was only when old-schoolers refused to change over to the new app that Adobe decided to keep PageMaker around for a while longer [rightly so, InDesign 1 sucked, and was *not* a Quark killer that they promised it would be].
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
1. No OpenType support. That means its utterly useless for the 75% of the world that doesn't use the American English alphabet.
2. No support for generation of press-ready PDF's. That is to say, no PDF/X support at all.
3. No support for managed color separations.
4. No XML->TeX pathway, which means it can't integrate with modern authoring workflows.
5. No stylesheet support, unless you count writing macros. Which I don't. Writing macros has more in common with symbolic math than it does with graphic design.
6. Only rudimentary support for contone and vector graphics. No intelligent text wrap, for example.
What's wrong with it? You CANNOT use it to generate a half-decent document, that's what's wrong with it.
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
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?
As for SGML/XML->TeX, you should look into the Jade project.
As for stylesheets, TeX has had them for decades, but yes they involve writing macros, unless LyX has a GUI for it; I don't see this as a disadvantage.
As for "half-decent" documents, TeX/LaTeX have helped produce thousands of books, papers, reports, articles and so on for nigh on 20 years.
Actually the machine you first activate it on is platform that license is locked into for its lifespan. So if you activate it on a mac that license is a mac license from here on out.
macromedia activation faq
If the link doesnt take you right to it, then see the question "If I install my MX 2004 product on the Microsoft(r) Windows(r) platform first, can I switch my license to the Apple(r) Macintosh(r) or vice versa?"
Adobe has(had) 3 main Desktop publishing apps, each with its own domain:
Pagemaker: Executive Secretary and home stuff(Kinda like Photoshop Elements), wants something prettier than MS Word, or they already know Pagemaker. Still supported on Mac OS with a carbonized Pagemaker 7
InDesign: Direct competition with Quark, Finally serious competition with InDesign 3.
Framemaker: Large Technical documents with LOTS of references, standard formatting, stuff that BIG companies and their vendors care about.
There is very little competition between these products from each other or other companies besides than the Quark-Indesign thing. (esp on the Mac). Chances are that since Adobe has neglected the Mac Framemaker community for so long, they would have to create a carbonized version of Framemaker for anyone to take it seriously and they simply don't want to expend the resources to do it.
I don't use LaTeX at all, so i'm not sure about all that. What I can tell you is that the distinction between "press-ready" PDF's and generic PDF's has to do with 4 color separation, spot color output, Line-screen calibration for presses, and correct 4-plate separation output. Not to mention overprint/knockout options & clipping paths for photos. Sorry, but if you are in the professional graphic design arena, your'e pretty much stuck with quark or inDesign, if you want consistent output when going to press...
Hmmmm, heard of a company called IBM? Ever read an IBM Redbook, ever looked what they used to generate them....That'd be FrameMaker.
You can still get Framemaker for linux. Check google for "fmlinux2.tar.gz".
You may also need the information in this post (unless the hack has already been applied).
- Brian.
Many of JPL's recent projects, including MER, DS1, MLS, Mars Pathfinder, MISR, Cassini, QuikScat, SeaWinds, and AIRS, have at least part of their documentation in FrameMaker formats (5/6/7, Mac/UNIX/Windows).
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?
Actually, The Omni Group did the Framemaker port to NeXTSTEP. You can still see a reference to it on their jobs page under the "What's Omni Like?" heading. If Adobe wanted to put forth the money, The Omni Group could do the port.
Tex / Latex is intended as a tool for serious, black-and-white, scientific writing with lots of formulas. It may suck at colour separation, but its math typesettings capabilities are fantastic. The Word's equation editor is a joke in comparison. I tried FrameMaker at one moment and gave up. For instance, putting indices was too annoying in FM, I had to chase some menu items with the mouse, while in Latex I can achieve that by, say, $a_i$.
(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.
I actually used to do technical support for Framemaker (and I had a lot of fun doing it too) if you don't believe me reply to this and I can send plenty of references that prove this fact.
I haven't worked there in a while - but a lot of the other teams supported products that probably had fewer calls with products that had far more problems. Well over 75% of all the calls I took were tech writers using windows - the rest of them Unix (usually Solaris) and Mac - even then I didn't have to take very many calls on the product.
Even then it suprises me they stopped supporting it - since I never recalled any real support issues other then the fact it was an OS8/OS9 app (it ran just fine in X) its not like it was hard to support or anything and it really didn't have any major issues. The Unix version was pretty monolithic compared to many Unix apps. A great example of this is adding fonts to Framemaker which also shows how Frame handles fonts (this doc applies to Frame 7 and 7.1 too except they can use opentype fonts as well)
No GUI layout, as far as I know
Lyx comes to mind.
A pain to learn and use.
No more difficult than HTML for most tasks. Significantly easier for some and a bit more finicky for others.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
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.
::applause::
I'd like to point out one can find actual examples which support the above well-reasoned refuation at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase (ob. discl. I've got some stuff in that).
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I had no idea you couldn't use Acrobat for authoring stuff. That's pretty surprising, I'm not sure I believe you.
.pdf format.
.pdf.
Believe it. Acrobat Professional is simply a suite of conversion and mark-up tools. You can develop your document anyway you want to; then "print" or "distill" to
You can edit existing text, but there's no way to create a new line of text. You can't place or paste a picture (unless you lie and tell Acrobat it's a "Movie").
You can add form fields, javascript, links and other interactive gewgaws, but that's all in layers sitting on top of your original layout.
You can add, delete, extract or replace pages, but you have to thave the page you're gonna replace it with already distilled/converted.
Probably the nearest thing to doing layout in Acrobat would be doing it in Illustrator, and saving directly to
And you, madam, are very ugly. In the morning, I shall be sober.
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. DriftmeyerI'm don't use LaTeX often enough to consider myself anywhere close to an expert, but I'm curious as to the distinction between "press-ready" PDFs and generic PDFs.
The PDF format wasn't designed with printing in mind. As such, it's possible (indeed, trivially easy) to generate a PDF that's completely unsuitable for print production. For example, it's easy to generate a PDF with embedded RGB image data. It's easy to generate a PDF with OPI comments. It's easy to generate a PDF without embedding the fonts. And so forth and so on.
PDF/X was designed to be a subset of PDF that would take care of all these problems. A document that's compliant with PDF/X-1a is guaranteed to work when sent to a RIP and then to printing plates for offset or web printing.
Lots of print outlets have stopped accepting any other file formats. For example, Time/Warner won't accept any advertising that's in any other form than PDF/X-1a. No camera-ready art, no film, no TIFF/IT, no EPS, no PDF unless it's specifically compliant with the PDF/X-1a spec.
So, for example, if you want to build a full-page ad to run in Time magazine, no TeX-based solution can help you.
As for stylesheets, TeX has had them for decades, but yes they involve writing macros... I don't see this as a disadvantage.
Then you're not living in the real world. Sorry; don't mean to be rude. It's just how things are, ya know?
As for "half-decent" documents, TeX/LaTeX have helped produce thousands of books, papers, reports, articles and so on for nigh on 20 years.
No. TeX helped produce thousands of books and so on in the past, but is not up to producing books and so on to the standards of modern print publishing. It just can't do the job, and it's foolish to think that it can.
You're right. They are killing FM entirely.
Have been for about 6 or 7 years in fact. However, there were certain government agencies and large multinational companies that use it, and they had enough clout with Adobe to postpone the inevitable. But it will happen.
I used to work with someone who used to work at Adobe. They were there right after Adobe bought Frame Technologies. They said that the core code is such a mess, they couldn't find any programmers willing or talented enough to make sense of it. Hence, most of the "new features" (and there have been very few in the last 4 releases!) have been "tacked on" via DLLs and the like.
Currently, nothing in the open source or commerical software community comes close to doing the unique things that Frame does. It's a pain to learn, and a pain to use (yes, the UI sucks!), but it does one thing very well. And that's very long documents. I've personally managed documents of over 10,000 pages with it. On a old 486 when version 3.0 first came out for Windows.... (I didn't write all of that document, but I'm the one who linked all the chapters into a master document and generated the master table of contents and master index.) Doing a project that large with Frame was difficult, but with nearly anything else, it would have been impossible.
Word, WordPerfect, PageMaker, InDesign, Quark, etc. are earlier to use, but they all "hit the wall" after sometimes as little as a few dozen pages. TeX and it's variants produce better *looking* documents, but they are also extremely hard to learn and difficult to use well. And there are still some things that TeX just can't do.