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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."
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 think the low sales might have something to do with never releasing an update for OSX and pretty much letting the software rot on the back shelves for years.
I read the internet for the articles.
FrameMaker still beats any other word processor-like application for large document production. I'm part of an engineering organization and we've looked at moving from FrameMaker but nothing else replaces it without the loss of a lot of functionality. A bunch of people could colaborate on a document, pull it together and publish it. We're engineers, not typesetters so while InDesign could do it (I'm sure anyway) we're not about to learn a new package just for this purpose.
We've played with OpenOffice templates but there doesn't seem to be a real way to handle pulling together a document. TeX can do it but it would have a steep learning curve for something that isn't our primary purpose. I know TeX myself but I'm not about to be the one who gets tapped to teach it to everybody else (all the while still working hard at doing solid engineering work)
FrameMaker was painful in some ways, mostly because it wasn't "Just a word processor". Once that aspect was realized it was fairly painless however.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
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
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.
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.
Ahh how refreshing to hear a state/government employee voting with someone elses (taxpayers) wallet.
That deal for the products did cost money, just not money out of *your* pocket.
Point by point refutation of parent post here...
Point 1: "Utterly useless for 75% of the world that doesn't use the American alphabet."
Point 1 refutation: Bullshit. I have personally typeset texts in Japanese, Korean, and Hebrew in LaTeX. Support for Sanskrit and Elvish are easy to find if you look at CTAN. You can imagine that anything in between those extremes is drop-dead simple.
Point 2: "No support for press-ready PDF, that is to say no support for PDF/X at all."
Point 2 refutation: Bullshit. I use pdflatex on a daily basis, and the guys and gals at the print shop consistently compliment me on the resulting PDFs. teTeX, the dominant TeX/LaTeX distribution, includes many tools for converting to and tweaking output for a number of different formats.
Point 3: "No support for managed color separations."
Point 3 refutation: Who gives a damn? The strong point of TeX/LaTeX is typesetting mathematical papers, and when Knuth wrote it, it was in simple frustration that his books looked like crap after being put through the preceding technology. The fact that it can be used for other things is a bonus.
Point 4: "No XML->TeX pathway."
Point 4 refutation: Try Google. Not to mention that even a beginning programmer can figure out how to parse XML into LaTeX or TeX after an afternoon of looking at the two. At this point I have to wonder if you aren't talking completely out your ass.
Point 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."
Point 5 refutation: Gee, what are all these foo.sty files all around my texmf directory? They may be macros, but using LaTeX, pretty much all of the macros have been written for you. Not to mention that if you're trying to use LaTeX or TeX for graphic design, you are a moron. Use the tool for its strengths, not for its weaknesses -- design your graphics in another program, save them in one of the half-dozen or more acceptable formats for LaTeX, and use any of the four graphic inclusion/positioning packages that come standard with any TeX distribution. At this point, I'm almost positive that you're a troll, so I won't bother posting this under my user account.
Point 6: "Only rudimentary support for contone and vector graphics. No intelligent text wrap, for example."
Point 6 refutation: I don't contest the first sentence -- I have already refuted it above. Save your freaking diagram out from another program (I personally recommend xfig and tgif for diagramming) and include it in your LaTeX document using one of the standard packages. As for your assertion that there is no intelligent text wrap, you are clearly on glue. Try actually USING it before you decide that -- not only is the text wrap great, but the justification is top-notch, and the hyphenation understands about two dozen different languages. Beats the living hell out of Frame, Quark, InDesign, and the crowd. And yes, I've used them before.
Point 7: "You CANNOT use it to generate a half-decent document..."
Point 7 refutation: Please piss up a rope. No one is trying to make you use it. You don't even have to like it. Just don't try to confuse your not liking it with it not being a good way to go.