Adobe FrameMaker

Draft

Definition

Adobe Framemaker is a wordprocessor that is particularly suitable for writing large technical documents.

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 crossreferences (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.
• Numberin works (at any level of nesting and chapter/section-based renumering). In Word or OpenOffice it does not.

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) also let it die, but larger companies probably prevented that. Since Adobe started using it themselves (according to rumours) to write their own documentation, e.g. for CS3 things have improved.

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 on had to buy an expensive SGML version to do so.

However, there is still impressive list of missing features:

• No real time spelling and synatax 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:

• Mif2lyx

Links

(these need to verified !)

At Adobe

• Product Home Page
• FAQ 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.

• Frame 8 is here: conversion or migration from unstructured FrameMaker to DITA

Framemaker and DocBook

• FrameMaker with DocBook XML (a user note)

Tools

• Convert legacy data from FrameMaker commercial product.

Lists of lists

• FrameMaker Resources
• Essential Resources for FrameMaker Users
• Adobe Framemaker Tutorials : Framemaker Resources & Links