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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."
"[...] many are now wondering how long it'll now last for any platform."
I think the real question is "how long it'll last for any platform other than Windows?"
Sad.
Trolling is a art,
Truly cross-platform, professional page layout, incredibly smart fonts and free! Stop chaining yourself to proprietary shit that can get killed any day.
As cool as it is too see major software being released for multiple platforms, especially linux. Something like this is going to happen. Just a few weeks ago, Macromedia announced that it was going to support linux. Now adboe is dropping a mac product.
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 haven't heard anyone say they are using Framemaker for serious development of anything in years.
I wonder if they got tired of all those 'If runs on OS X, why don't you have a Linux version? They're practically the same thing!' questions.
- Tash
If they sold it for $99, they'd probably make more money.
and the idea of a special app for making frames - that's completely nuts. adobe should have done this years ago.
sulli
RTFJ.
Can anyone say: Final Cut Pro payback?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
...that Adobe has puchased a competitor and then killed off the competing product. Didn't they do the same thing with PageMaker?
In any case, it would seem difficult for a company to justify splitting its development resources between two competing products. FrameMaker users surely must have (or should have) seen this coming.
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
Adobe is a company that needs to make money to survive (like all companies). If a product isn't selling well enought, it will get killed.
So the fault isn't squarely on Adobes shoulders in this - the particular segment of the market that Framemaker for Mac catered to just isn't big enought for the software to keep selling...
On the lighter side, this must be a wonderfull opertunity for the Open Source Software to show that it can deliver somethign just as good for the Mac, right?
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
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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I hear a BSD port is in the works.
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.
I don't actually think I know a production professional who uses Framemaker - although it is not bad for BIG documents. Clearly Adobe is putting its weight behind Indesign it is battle to dislodge the (in my opinion) excorable Quark Xpress.
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
A bigger question for Framemaker user currently on Mac is do they qualify for the next upgrade version, transitioning from Mac to Windows?
Macromedia has done a great thing in packaging MX2004 with both Mac and Windows versions in the same box -- I can upgrade any of my systems -- mac, or windows -- and use the software on the fastest box in my studio.
Software makers have been telling us for decades that hardware is a commodity and software is what's important. It's about time that the liscensing model changes to reflect that.
This is a great chance for Adobe to do just that. I hope they do.
And while feature parity might indeed be equivalent between the apps on either platform, I've run in to a few pretty frustrating cache overflow, GID and system hang problems on Windows versions of Illustrator and PS that reminded me why 'real' designers use Macs >:D
I hate Grammar Nazi's
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.
Apparently Adobe's strategic plans are being
made by technically incompetent people who
do not understand that OSX is a variant of
Unix (in the API compatibility sense, rather
than the trademark sense).
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Right. Apple keeps encroaching further and further into Adobe's territory when they are one of only a handful of companies that didn't bail on Apple in the mid/late 90s. Quite a thank you, don't you think?
I think it's Adobe finally getting sick of giving Apple all their ideas for iRippoff iApps, particularly after being such a stauch supporter through the roughest years. Nah, they're sucking up to Microsoft, that's the ticket. Couldn't be anything anyone else did, all the evil in the world is always traceable back to MS.
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."
First you don't update FrameMaker for the Mac in two years, then you complain Mac sales are going down and now you kill it. Uh, if you updated it more often maybe people would buy it.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
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
Windows or Solaris only.
If it runs on Solaris, why not a Linux version? They're practically the same thing!
ok, I know, it was bad, but it had to be said.
-PainKilleR-[CE]
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
How many PhD student want to spend the money on Word when they can use LaTeX for free? And don't say they can write their dissertation in a lab, you can't even bring coffee in there. Plus, Word's equation editor is an atrocity against man.
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?
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.
Abandonware has nothing to do with whether the source is available.
"I think it's Adobe finally getting sick of giving Apple all their ideas for iRippoff iApps, particularly after being such a stauch supporter through the roughest years."
Hey, if Adobe wanted to be treated decently by Apple, perhaps they should stop labeling Windows PCs as their "preferred platform of choice." And Adobe sucking up to Microsoft will only cause them to become the next SpyGlass; after all, it is Microsoft, NOT Apple, that is trying to kill off the PDF file format for more proprietary versions of XML in the Office line.
As noted by practically everyone else on Slashdot in earlier threads back to near Creation, if Adobe was smart, they'd start supporting Linux instead of Windows or Mac...
Furthermore, if Premiere was actually a better product than Final Cut Pro, Adobe could actually compete upon merits instead of resorting to dropping all support because they have their panties all bunched up. Just like if Microsoft was actually concerned about developing Internet Explorer (but we all know that was just an exercise in killing off Netscape), they wouldn't have dropped Mac support - citing Apple's own internal knowledge of their operating system as reason...how ironic...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
What about other critical features being able to place figures and text-frames exactly where you want them (and not where LaTeX wants to misplace them)
There are rules for typesetting documents. TeX (and by extension, LaTeX) uses those rules. Word is like a plastic hammer and toolbelt for children compared to TeX's professional Estwing.
tracking changes/version control?
This is not the job of a word processor.
Think back to two years ago: do you think perhaps Adobe was swamped with DMCA-related questions?
Where exactly did you send your query? To a person or to a {help|info|webmaster|etc}@adobe address?
Was your question a FAQ? Did you bother to check?
To recap:
you sent email to a huge company
you didn't get a reply
feeling slighted, you sent a "less polite" email threatening to "boycott their products"
for some amazing reason, you didn't get a response to the second email
you took all this personally, and now are waging jihad against a company that doesn't know/care about your [alleged] lost business
Wow.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
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.
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.
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 $199 was laughable) I wouldn't recommend we continue with this product. Give me something that works cleanly in XML, indexes well, with tie-ins to a database structure, that produces decent HTML output and handles markers, variables and all of the "special" functions that Frame builds in and I'll sign up for it in a jiffy.
Check your knees - they seem to be jerking a lot. Adobe didn't stop you from using this. You can use the product for as long as you want, there will just not be any updates. You could put this on an OS9 machine and use it for years. Just saying that there will be no upgrades, does not mean they stop you from using it. Save your closed source arguments till they are justified.
Stay tuned for new sig...
What about other critical features being able to place figures and text-frames exactly where you want them (and not where LaTeX wants to misplace them) or tracking changes/version control?
Minipages, parboxes, and styles like floatflt all make complex figure placement quite painless (certainly no harder than complex figure placement in MS Word). As for version control and change tracking - given that latex is pure text it is pretty damn easy to keep latex files in CVS which provides far better version control than MS Word. If you really want, you can keep latex documents in Visual SourceSafe, as I once did at a Windows based company.
Do I sound annoyed? Well, I am annoyed. You would be too if your every PhD student would initially insist on using LaTeX for his manuscripts ("i'm not gonna touch M$ word with 10ft pole!") and then expects me to make notes on a print-out.
Really? They must be quite slow then - I just use pdflatex and get people to use PDF annotation facilities to make notes - works brilliantly.
Jedidiah
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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
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?
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've always used PageMaker, Illustrator and Photoshop.
Photoshop, oddly enough, was not originally designed with the print industry in mind until John and Thomas Knoll from Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic had sold it to Adobe.
Adobe's definitely feeling a kick in the pants from Apple...
Apple's developers, being far more ingenious at developing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, has vastly improved acquired applications such as Shake and DVD Studio Pro.
As a result of an explosion in digital cinematography and editing, people with advanced programming skills are harder to find, and therefore there's a greater need for user-friendly, robust apps on the superlative media platform.
Adobe has been riding high on Photoshop for years, and I find that particularly interesting since neither was Photoshop their product (it was invented by Thomas and John Knoll, of Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic), nor was it ever marketed by Adobe for the purpose for which it was invented... digital matte artistry and frame-by-frame image correction in motion pictures.
Unfortunately, they haven't really delivered on other products...Newer versions of Premiere had odd compatibility problems with various DV cameras, various interface bugs, a very poor titling tool that crashes frequently... Premiere Pro seems a desperate attempt to recover market share lost to Apple's vastly superior Final Cut Pro, imitating almost every major feature set of Final Cut Pro that was conspicuously absent in the standard version of Premiere.
As for After Effects... That application's edge was trumped when Apple acquired Shake, which has been used in Oscar-winning productions for seven straight years, including [i]Lord of the Rings[/i]... Shake is such an immensely powerful compositing system, it commands a sticker price four times that of After Effects Production Bundle. It's clear that Adobe's reign in the film and television industry is at its end... which means "Game Over" for one of their two primary target markets. So my response, as a content creator using Macs exclusively, to this and future missteps by Adobe in an effort to differentiate themselves from Apple who has all but entirely annihilated Adobe's market share... is, to quote Bender from The Breakfast Club, "B-O-O H-O-O."
Cry me a river...
If Apple ever plans to massively overhaul MacPaint and turns AppleWorks into a full-blown publishing suite, Adobe might as well file Chapter 11.
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.
There's a great TeX/LaTeX front end for OS X that I use called TeXShop. Aqua-friendly, set up to generate PDFs instead of DVIs by default, etc., etc.
Having said that, the people who've observed that FrameMaker is the industry standard for technical writing aren't kidding. TeX has its strongholds in academia and research, but go to any major commercial job board and search for technical writing positions. FrameMaker is almost guaranteed to not only be the most common document production system you run across, but to be far and away in front of its competitors. (From my observations, Microsoft Word is a distant second, various SGML tools showing up next and Quark, InDesign and TeX showing up once in a blue moon.)
I think when people recommend "obvious alternatives" they tend to forget just how difficult it is to make a switch from a legacy application. If you're maintainining a few hundred technical documents in FrameMaker format with a group of a half-dozen technical writers all using Macs, figure out how much money you'll spend on converting all of those to LaTeX and on retraining your technical writers, even if you're using the nicest and friendliest front-end imaginable. Even an optimistic estimate in such a scenario would approach a thousand man-hours of work. Compare that with the cost of buying your half-dozen technical writers new PCs with new FrameMaker licenses and giving them a week to get up to speed on platform differences.
Personally, I don't know FM and I don't really want to have to learn it. But I want to move more deeply into technical writing than I'm at now, and even if I could conclusively demonstrate that LaTeX would do everything a prospective client needs, that won't win me the work.
Nope, by all means write your own - it's not that hard. I wrote up some company standard document classes at one company I worked at, providing a standardised (but very different from the standard TeX look) for all company documents produced in TeX. The bonus was that I wrote 2 document classes - 1 for documents, 1 for presentations, in such a way that providing you added \summary{summary of paragraph here} at the beginning of sections and paragraphs the same latex source could produce a document or a presentation depending on which document class you used - very useful.
Orginally I did this because I was in the research department and needed to typeset a lot of mathematics. Typsetting math in Word is bad enough, typesettig it in Powerpoint is utterly diabolical. In the end, however, I got known for producing the best looking documents in the company - my document class closely mirrored the Word template (and was close enough for the marketing department to okay it
It doesn't take much effort at all to write a new document class for LaTeX - it sounds hard, but it is easy to inherit from one of the base classes and then just rejig things to suit your preferred style. It is definitely worth the time and effort!
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
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.
Copyrights do not enter the public domain just because they are no longer commercially exploited or widely available.
Just because a party owns a copyright doesn't give that party grounds to sue using that copyright unless that party can show that somebody did in fact infringe that copyright. The fair use of a copyrighted work, as defined by Title 17, United States Code, section 117, is not an infringement of copyright. I can see how a non-commercial distributor of abandonware could make a case for clause 1, clause 2, and clause 4. And even if the copyright owner does win a close fair use case when the general public widely supports the alleged infringer, I can see how that would trigger widespread boycotts of the copyright owner's other products.
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.
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. DriftmeyerAdobe'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.
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'?
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.
After reading this /. flamefest, I decided to download and try LyX (QT Mac/Aqua).
First impressions after a minute of kicking the tires? I'll pass.
I'll stick with true Cocoa apps. The QT widgets look so, "linuxy," and the program doesn't use Cocoa's open/save/print/etc. panels.
When you use a Mac, you expect a certain and look and feel to a program. If a program deviates too much from that look and feel, then it will be a pain to use. The basic parts of a all programs should be the same (as is true with Cocoa apps).