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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
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...