Adobe FrameMaker: Difference between revisions
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=== FrameMaker and DocBook === | === FrameMaker and DocBook === | ||
* [http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/tools.html#d997e1901 FrameMaker with DocBook XML] (a user note) | The included DocBook in FM 8 is plain old. | ||
* [http://www.swhitlat.com/docbook.php Steve Whitlatch] gives away a [[DocBook]] XML 4.4 setup (not tested yet) | |||
* [http://www.dpawson.co.uk/docbook/tools.html#d997e1901 FrameMaker with DocBook XML] (a user note for the old FM 7.2 included DocBook) | |||
=== Tools === | === Tools === | ||
Revision as of 17:52, 24 September 2008
Definition
Adobe FrameMaker is a word processor that is particularly suitable for writing large technical documents (thousands of pages) or books. E.g. O'Reilly produced most of their books with FrameMaker, but now are moving to a "pure" DocBook solution.
Discussion
- Positive things
FrameMaker is solid and has some excellent features:
- Good multi-file support
- Good HTML/XML export facilities
- Good support for cross-references (Microsoft Word does not)
- It's solid (e.g. lists and style never reformat randomly as compared to Word
- It prints like looks, there are no strange page breaks and such
- Headers and footers can be created easily (a nightmare in Word 2003).
- XML support, in particular for DITA
- Figures and tables including captions work (e.g. captions stay with the figures and they can float to the top or the bottom). In Word 2003 they can't.
- The drawing program is not outstanding, but at least it's solid.
- Numbering works (at any level of nesting and chapter/section-based renumbering). In Word or Open-Office it does not.
- It provides perfect PDF output.
- Negative things
FrameMaker has been around for a long time. Daniel K. Schneider has been using it in the early nineties already. E.g. I remember the day before I had to turn in my 500 p. PhD theses. I just sent it to the printer and it printed as it should. Totally hassle free.
Since then, the product did not evolve very much. Adobe (after it bought the company) almost let this product die, but larger companies probably prevented that. Since Adobe started using it themselves (according to rumors) to write their own documentation, e.g. for CS3 things did improve a bit.
Compared to older versions of the nineties, FrameMaker 8 has:
- multiple undo (until FM 7 this wasn't available !)
- integrates XML (structured editing). Until FrameMaker 5 or 6, one had to buy an expensive SGML version to do so.
However, there is still impressive list of missing features:
- No real time spelling and syntax correction
- Lousy support for DocBook (the files look the same as 5 years ago ...)
- No XSL-FO support.
- No citation/bibliography support. Third-party solutions exists, but are rather clumsy to use.
Software
Various filtering software:
Links
(these need to verified !)
At Adobe
FAQs
- FrameMaker FAQ (Version 2.3.1, May 2006)
- Frame/FAQ. The old Usenet FAQ - not updated since 1996 :)
Tutorials
- FrameMaker Tutorials. A good meta list of FM tutorials.
- Adobe FrameMaker Tutorials list (About.com)
FrameMaker and DocBook
The included DocBook in FM 8 is plain old.
- Steve Whitlatch gives away a DocBook XML 4.4 setup (not tested yet)
- FrameMaker with DocBook XML (a user note for the old FM 7.2 included DocBook)
Tools
- Convert legacy data from FrameMaker commercial product.