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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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?
By primitive GUI I assume you mean Lyx has structure.
Why do you want to do things the hardest way possible (using an MS Word style interface) when there are easier way to accomplish your task? It's pretty easy to overlay your notes over a PS or DVI, notes written in your favorite text editor, WYSIWYG editor or paint program.
With PDF it's even easier. If you have Adobe Acrobat (the full version) you can insert comments and highlight and draw ontop of a PDF. (it's a WYSIWYG + simple paint program combined). I find acrobat to be a very simple way to review documents. And it doesn't matter if they used LaTeX, troff or MS Word to do it. As long as I get them all as PS or PDF then I can review them.
You made the assumption that the reviewer had to use the same software as the authors. The conflict you have is because authoring documents and reviewing documents are very different tasks and some software is better than others for doing one task or another.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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?
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)
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. Driftmeyer