Adobe turns its back on Mac again

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Framemaker is not a brochure design application

Well it could be used for that. What Framemaker is best for
writing (very) large complex books and technical documenation,
for large complex documents like conference schedules, and for
situations where you want writers to write, but end up with nice
SGML/XML structured documents without encumbering the
writers with doing too many 'special' things to arrive at this
result.

My research group has used Framemaker to deal with large
hypertext projects before the www came on the scene. Along the
way we discovered it was a good medium for compiling and
editing books (much much faster than any alternative ... a book
could be set in publishable form in a long afternoon, proofs sent
out and corrected in another). After the web became popular,
web publishing addons were developed that could deliver this
complex content to the web. Then the SGML/XML layer was
added, which allowed us to directly generate SGML and then XML
directly, rather than interpreting the interchange format
Framemaker created.

Framemaker is hard to beat for its strengths. Originally a
product from Frame computing, it has long been available for
Solaris, Macintosh and somewhate later on Windows when this
finally arrived on the scene in a usable form. We used it because
we had users on each of these platforms, and the files were
transportable between the platforms, with identical formatting
results on each (for Word users; it is handy to have formatting
decisions retained between uses on even a single computer. Ask
for it).

Adobe has let this produce languish for three or four years with
only a basic (but useful) update. We have been exploring
alternatives for the past three years, and have yet to find
anything adequate, though we have identified some make-do
interrum possibilities, all of which require much more handling
and are much less efficient in production.

Though long in the tooth, obsolete is too strong a word. There is
no clear replacement that works as well in a production
environment. The problem is that the task it was designed for is
not a mass market task. I suspect that Adobe will find that they
are weakening the small market they have with Framemaker by
removing Macintosh support, as the multi-platform aspect is
important in the only industries (publishing and research) that
still have a sizable number of macs ... and is the only industry
likely to use Framemaker. This bodes badly for the Solaris future
as well, since it wouldn't be very hard to write a solaris version
that could be ported to OS X to run under X-Windows, which
would be fine with us. So we have to suspect that the Solaris
version is in danger as well.

We'll live. But from me, a fond and sad goodbye to Framemaker.

Posted by: mdfischer   Posted on: 03/24/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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