I share your "slack-jawed wonder" with this. FrameMaker seems to be focused on improvements for a particular market (structured Frame, DITA, topic-based authoring), while at the same time neglecting an existing market (catalogs and books with color requirements). A baseline requirement for any page-layout program is to do color correctly (not to mention a pasteboard, paragraph rules, baseline shift, ruler guides, "Don't show this again" in warning dialog boxes, etc.). There is antidotal evidence that even users moving to structured authoring are moving away from FrameMaker. Because of FrameMaker's traditional strengths, I have always said that the technical and long-document publishing market is Adobe's to lose. Unfortunately, their handling of FrameMaker has been largely self-destructive.
The suggestion to move to InDesign is certainly not appropriate for many large catalogs, particularly if you are using automation. While InDesign is very scriptable, its scripting performance (and performance in general) on large documents is very sluggish. I realize that Dov has nothing directly to do with FrameMaker, but I wonder if any of the FrameMaker people at Adobe read this list. Rick Quatro Carmen Publishing Inc. 585-659-8267 rick at frameexpert.com www.frameexpert.com http://www.frameexpert.com/peace/ At 09:58 -0800 28/1/10, Dov Isaacs wrote: >On the Macintosh, real grayscale TIFF came out into PostScript and hence PDF as grayscale. Other than for EPS, this never happened on Windows prior to FrameMaker 9 "save as PDF" without the RGB option.... Quite frankly, if you really need to worry about critical color and graphic arts issues and >don't need certain FrameMaker creature comforts and structured document features, you might consider migrating to InDesign. I have been following this thread with a certain amount of slack-jawed wonder. A pr?cis seems to be 'Mac FrameMaker did color right, Windows FrameMaker doesn't and may never'. Draw your own conclusions. I doubt whether Scott's looking forward to migrating his client's catalogs, with thousands of pages and millions of images, to InDesign. -- Steve _______________________________________________