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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 haven't heard anyone say they are using Framemaker for serious development of anything in years.
If they sold it for $99, they'd probably make more money.
So....does that make it "Abandonware"?
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
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.
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.
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."
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.
So write Adobe and ask them to make it public domain. Not necessarily open source, just public domain. If they're not going to sell the binaries any more, then why would they care if people share them?
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
...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).
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.
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.
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?
It never ran on OS X. So that answers that question.
Sort of. Problem is, they had a Linux version three years ago. FrameMaker on Linux.
So the mystery deepens. What the fuck happened to Frame on Linux, and if Adobe could port from Solaris to Linux three years ago, surely they can port from Solaris to OS X (and Solaris to Linux) today.
I can see the market for Frame on Linux being pretty small in 2000 -- anyone with $800 to spend on software probably wasn't using Linux as a desktop. I can't see that argument holding water today. And that goes double for OS X.
Bad business, when you are at the mercy of your customer coming to you.
So instead we make sure to keep VERY up to date. On the other hand we also have an OS9 and a Windows box chugging along with a whole slew of old out dated software on it as well. Just in case.
If you are one in a million, then there are six thousand people who are just like you.
Adobe just realized that they weren't selling that many copies of the application on the Mac side, and decided to drop it.
Heh, something they just realized. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that they have not made a OSX native version? Seeing as Mac sales accounted for 73% of Framemaker sales 2 years ago, maybe they should have wondered why, oh why, would our sales numbers be dropping. Adobe has been trying to kill Framemaker without pissing off their customers too much for years.
I've designed, written and maintained
cross-platoform GUIs on MacOS (pre OSX),
Win32 and X11/Unix since the advent of Win32
(the youngest of the three platforms).
While my OSX experience is limited, I am
at least aware that the OSX platform now
includes X11 support.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
I hope this is a joke. I've been using LaTeX for close to 20 years, unable to dump it because of technology lock-in. It's pretty much a necessity for anyone who wants to publish in mathematics, computer science, and some other technical fields. However, I'd have to count LaTeX as one of the worst technologies in existence. The facilities of the underlying TeX system are amazingly poor by modern standards. Despite being a document publishing system, TeX does not have a single graphics primitive (apart from font rendering). The TeX language is amazingly poorly designed by modern standards, making the creation and maintainence of TeX code a very arcane art and making it extremely difficult for independently written packages to play well together or build on each other. There is hardly support in TeX for ordinary programming constructs, much less fundamental things like namespace, modularization, compositionality, etc. Even basic things like its resource limitations and low precision arithmetic create serious problems in practice (e.g. amazingly, you can easily end up with text on adjacent lines out of alignment because of this). TeX also has no concept of local confinement, so if you write a 300 page book and make a change on page 2, you can't guarantee that there won't be effects propagated to page 300. Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.
In the early 1990's, there was a big meeting of the TeX community at which about half the TeXperts thought that TeX was too backward to be salvageable and the other half thought something could be preserved if it were extensively overhauled. What happened? Nobody did anything. In the meantime, a team assembled to produced LaTeX 3, which is a kludge intended to cover TeX's failings beneath a massive layer of TeX code, much as Windows 3.1 tries to bury DOS's failings as an OS. Not surprisingly, LaTeX 3 has been going for more than 10 years now with very little discernible progress.
And I'm just skimming the surface here. You could easily write a multivolume "Encyclopedia of What's Wrong with LaTeX."
No, LaTeX is a terrible, aweful, horrible, technology. If you plucked a stinking, homeless, VB flunk-out off the floor of the subway and asked him to write a successor to LaTeX, and he hacked it out in a drunken stupor, all the while vomiting shoe polish onto the keyboard, and shouting at an imaginary green cat, I can't see how it'd be much less than 300% better than LaTeX 2e.
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.
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.
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.
Find me a Cyrillic version of Caslon, please. For OpenType: two minutes on the Adobe web site. For TeX, hours of scouring the Internet ultimately ending in failure, because no such font exists.
I use pdflatex on a daily basis, and the guys and gals at the print shop consistently compliment me on the resulting PDFs.
The "print shop?" Look, man, we're not talking about the local Kinko's here. We're talking about large-scale commercial printing. If you don't send them a file that's compliant to the PDF/X-1a specification, it won't even get past the preflight process. They'll simply bounce it back to you.
Who gives a damn? [about color separations]
I think this argument really defeats itself, don't you?
The strong point of TeX/LaTeX is typesetting mathematical papers
Then how come we're talking about using it as a replacement for Framemaker?
Not to mention that even a beginning programmer...
Another argument that serves as its own counter-argument.
They may be macros, but using LaTeX, pretty much all of the macros have been written for you.
Where's the macro that gives me a 9p5 column of Utopia Std 9.5/10.5 horizontally scaled to 95% with a tracking value of -5 and optical margin alignment?
I guess all the macros haven't been written for me yet, have they?
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
Can't. None of those packages results in output that complies with PDF/X-1a, which means the commercial printer that handles our work won't accept the resulting files.
not only is the text wrap great
How can I tell it to detect the edges of an included PDF and to wrap the type around them, using a 10.5 point runaround?
I'm really asking, because if it's possible, I have never been able to figure out how to do it.
Hell, I'd even be willing to put a clipping path on the artwork if I absolutely had to... although that would add hours to my work-day, so I'd still end up using InDesign.
No one is trying to make you use it.
Well, considering that the assertion that was advanced was that TeX could be used as a substitute for Frame, I'd say that my remarks were entirely appropriate. And far more polite than yours. Piss up a rope, yourself, asshole.
Your points are appreciated, and, in many situations, your argument is perfectly sound. However, it doesn't really work for us.
1) The sheer age and cruft of the news database is starting to catch up with us. We can't have an on-line archive, in part because Newsedit just can't handle it.
2) We have lots of modern hardware, but occasionally a program written for OS7 (or possibly even earlier, I'm no Mac Historian) can be unhappy with newer software.
3) We're quite familiar with it --but we also have occasional fits of pique at its limitations.
The biggest problem is that Quark has moved on since version 4.1, and the newer versions have features that, while we don't necessarily NEED them, would be very, VERY nice to have.
Unfortunately, our version of Newsedit only plays nice with Quark 4.1.
Believe me, most of us are more than ready to retrain. Indeed, most of us younger folk actually LEARNED to newspaper on systems more advanced than what I'm now using. On top of that, the paper's systems guy insists that 90 percent of our computer problems are due to using the old software (often on blazing-new machines).
It's true that the software is doing what's required, but I and many others here feel that we'd be a little more productive with modern tools.
OSX was around in server form before the desktop variant came out, and also in beta form available to developers. I'd think it safe to say Adobe would have had access to it enough for at least 4 years to do an adequate translation. Apple was prodding devs towards at least writing Carbon apps for longer than that, if I remember right. The dual-compatability mode was the subject of ads featuring the very first G3s (blue-box and yellow box modes anyone?), which were released in '97.
So, the work of your students just screams out: "THIS DOCUMENT WAS LAID OUT IN MS WORD!"?. Because trust me, the page layout of a default Word template is instantly recognisable to anyone with the slightest knowledge of typography and layout (For one, it's f*cking ugly).
Or do your students create those documents full of different typefaces, disjointed figures and tables and sundry unnecessary frills?
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
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.
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 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.
At least the TeX/LaTeX "cryptic" markup language shows others how to produce all of the effects seen in the final document. I often refer to other LaTeX documents to see/remember how to create a given affect.
Another plus for *any* ASCII-based document format is that the content will always be available. In the case of TeX/LateX, the language is extremely mature and not prone to gratuitous changes that leave older documents unprocessible. What is the half-life of a Word document again?
Open Source: I'll show you mine if you show me yours.