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FrameMaker 8: First impressions
Thursday, August 09, 2007 — posted by Sarah
FrameMaker 8 is now available from Adobe. The new trial version is fully functional for 30 days. This is a big improvement over previous versions, where the "demo" version would function indefinitely but had saving and printing disabled. You need to save a document before you can create a book or import a template, so the demo version was of limited use.The "fully functional" trial, however, comes with a trade-off -- like the rest of the Adobe software, FrameMaker 8 now requires activation. I haven't heard any reports of problems with activation, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.
Caution for beta testers: Reports on the frameusers list indicate difficulties with installing the trial version on a system that had a beta version installed.
Interface
I see a few minor changes to the interface. If you have multiple documents open, you now have a series of tabs available, and the various toolbar icons have changed slightly.
On the structured side, a new DITA menu is available by default, and the Structure Tools menu has moved from File > Structure Tools to the main menu bar.
Adobe has standardized on new icons for its various products, which bear a distinct resemblance to periodic table entries from chemistry. Fm, then, is fermium, about which you will find the following at webelements.com:
Fermium's chemical properties are largely unknown. Fermium is a radioactive rare earth metal. The longest living isotope is is 257Fm with a half-life of 80 days. It is of no commercial importance.Did they have to rub it in?
You'll find other small changes here and there:
- The vertical toolbar icons have changed a bit.
- The File menu now has Save as XML and Save as PDF options.
- The Graphics menu has a 3D Menu submenu.
- Three new entries in the Special menu for conditional text (now has a submenu), filter by attribute, and text change tracking.
- The View menu has entries to turn the tabbed bar and text change toolbar on and off.
- A few new check boxes in the preferences.
Unicode
Unicode has to win the award for Greatest Engineering Effort Required for Least Interface Change. FrameMaker 8 now supports Unicode, which in practice means that you can produce documents in Russian, Greek, Turkish, and other languages that use non-Latin alphabets. Note that right-to-left languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic, are not supported (although there are persistent rumors about mirror processing, da Vinci-style).
In addition to the basic text processing, you'll find Unicode support throughout the product's dialog boxes, so for example, you can create a paragraph tag name that uses Cyrillic characters.
Support for "rich media" -- Flash and Acrobat 3D
I think this is the most interesting new feature. Other enhancements fall in the Necessary Evil category -- adding Unicode is a major technical achievement, but most user reaction has been along the lines of "What took you so long?"
But support for Flash and Acrobat 3D output opens up some fascinating possibilities for interactive PDF files. For instance, our training workbooks currently contain animated screen shots with voice-overs. To access them, you click a movie icon and a separate media viewer launches. (The link in the following image is not live.)
Using FrameMaker 8, we can create a PDF file that plays the movie in context.
Sample of Flash integration (PDF, almost 3 MB, with sound)
(Note that you need to click on the image and then click the Play button at the bottom left corner of the image to get the Flash movie to play. This is a deficiency of the software we used to generate a quick-and-dirty Flash file from our existing AVI files, not a problem with Flash itself. You can also create movies that play when you click on them.)
Pretty cool!
Warning: We have had significant problems getting this feature to work. Generally, it works when we create a new document (File > New) and use the default Portrait template in FrameMaker 8. Generally, it does not work when we start with a file created in FrameMaker 7. I assume that Adobe will be fixing this Real Soon Now.
Complex conditional text and show/hide attributes
I wrote an article for the new FrameMaker Developer Center on these new features.
In short, quite useful for complex single sourcing projects.
Track text changes
Another entry in the Shoulda Been There a Long Time Ago Derby, I'm afraid.
DITA support
DITA support has graduated from Adobe Labs to an integrated part of the application. Unfortunately, the DITA Open Toolkit support was lost in the transition, but I am told it will be available as a download "soon."
Thoughts
The rich media integration is interesting. Attribute-based conditions are a must-have for any serious structured workflow. Likewise, the addition of Unicode support remedies a serious defect.
But I wonder if Adobe is emphasizing the right things. More and more, our customers are asking us for lightweight XML authoring tools. They may use FrameMaker as a powerhouse publishing environment for XML content, but they want something much smaller for their numerous contributors. I'd like to see an elegant XML authoring tool -- think DreamWeaver for XML -- that complements FrameMaker's strengths in print/PDF publishing.
(Alan Pringle contributed to this posting.)
Labels: framemaker review
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