RE: Technical Writing Suite From Adobe

[hedley . finger]

Bill:

> sell into the Academic publishing market

And into the commercial publishing non-fiction market!  Then publishers 
can stop using dumb Cindex and Sky Index to produce indexes that don't 
embed in the source text and have to be done all over again when they (a) 
publish the illustrated edition, (b) publish the paperback edition, (c) 
produce a revised edition with new matter, (d) license the publishing or 
translation rights, or (e) do anything that changes the page breaks and 
screws the index locator numbers.  Using IXgen to edit or translate the 
index while preserving all index entries no matter how pages break has got 
to be a plus.

Trouble is, the outsourcing and cottage-industry nature of publishing 
means all those freelance copy-editors, typographers (book designers), and 
indexers would all have to purchase FrameMaker, whereas EVERYBODY has 
Quark Express, InDesign, and Word.

Sob!

Hedley
--
Hedley Finger
Technical Communications Tools & Processes Specialist
MYOB Australia 
P.O. box 371   Blackburn VIC 3130   Australia
12 Wesley Court   Tally Ho Business Park   East Burwood VIC 3151 Australia

Tel. +61 3 9222 9992 x 7421,   Mob. (cell) +61 412 461 558

© MYOB Technology Pty Ltd 2006
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RE: Technical Writing Suite From Adobe

[Bill Briggs]

At 11:41 AM -0700 4/25/06, Daniel Emory wrote:
>WHAT I PROPOSE INSTEAD is that Adobe provide a new
>version of FrameMaker that includes (in addition to
>all the existing link types) the new types specified
>in the XLink standard, and also provide an upgraded
>version of Acrobat that can, when a FrameMaker file is
>saved as PDF, preserve all those link types.

 Wouldn't that be a treat. I'd dance naked in the back yard if they did that. 
Well, okay, they'd have to do an OS X version to get me naked, but it would be 
a really big deal if they were to do that. I'm so tired of software upgrades 
that add bullshit features (I'm reminded of Eudora's chili peppers, and ESP 
groups, or other stuff nobody uses). A few long standing FrameMaker bugs fixed 
would be nice too (I've always dreamed of a cross-reference marker that worked).

 But I've more or less given up on Adobe doing anything to keep me on 
FrameMaker. It's a lost cause for us Mac users, and Solaris will be next to go, 
and then our department is right back to where we were before we bought 
FrameMaker 4 years ago. Adobe screwed us and torched our "solution". I'm not 
booting into any Windows OS just to use FrameMaker. The baggage of XP or Vista 
isn't worth the headache. Every time I use XP in the lab at work I am 
astonished at how convoluted it is. I'll be fine with LaTeX.

 Pity that Adobe didn't take heed of the suggestions like the ones just offered 
by Dan. Pity that they didn't fix the footnotes, make it truly cross platform 
again, and sell into the Academic publishing market. It's huge, and ripe for 
the plucking. It's now dominated by very unhappy Word users. But we'll never 
see anything done about this.

 They'll never get another cent of mine.

 - web
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RE: Technical Writing Suite From Adobe

[Daniel Emory]

The "Content Wrangler's" "vision" of FrameMaker’s
future is fatally flawed. It would do little to
improve the quality of on-line help, or increase the
penetration of FrameMaker into the on-line help
market.

Some years back, I wrote an article entitled "Thoughts
About On-Line Help", which is still available at:

www.microtype.com/resources/articles/OLdocs-DE.pdf

I still stand by most of the criteria and conclusions
discussed in that article, and very few. if any,
on-line help documents today come anywhere close to
meeting those criteria.

THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM WITH ON-LINE HELP is that it
delivers the content in HTML, XHTML or XML.This means
it relies almost solely on the canonical simple
cross-reference link: xlink:href="students.xml" to
implement the hypertext capability. NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
Although the XLink standard defines some additional
link types, none of them are now implementable in
FrameMaker, and few, if any, web browser or on-line
help products have been updated to support those
additional XLink capabilities.

BY CONTRAST, FrameMaker (since the early 1990s)
implements, in addition to the canonical
cross-reference link, 23 robust types of hypertext
links, including: GoToLink, Named Destination, Alert,
Alert with Title, Go to URL (launches browser and
displays the specified web page), Jump to Page Number,
Jump to Previous Page, Jump to Next Page, Jump Back,
Jump Back and Fit to Page, Open Document, Open
Document and Fit to Page, Open Document as New, Open
Document at Page Number, Pop-Up Menu, Button Matrix,
Message Client (communicates with other applications
and creates a link to a URL), Close Current Window,
Close All Hypertext Windows, and Exit Application.

Some of these link types (Alert, Alert with Title,
Pop-Up Menu, Button Matrix) require part of their
implementation to be accomplished on reference pages.
In addition, it should be possible to use the
reference page methodology to implement all of the
link types defined in the XLink standard.

By inserting graphic buttons with embedded hypertext
commands on FrameMaker master pages, navigation bars
can be easily implemented. I’ve implemented large
FrameMaker hypertext documents in which such
master-page navigation bars were used to provide
buttons such as "Global" (clicking on this button
produced a menu of links to major subject areas, plus
hypertexted tables of contents, indexes and
glossaries), Local (clicking on this button produces a
menu of links to locations within the current subject
area), Previous (jumps to the location of the previous
link), and Next (goes to the next page).

UNFORTUNATELY, nearly all of FrameMaker’s linking
capabilities are not convertible to PDF, HTML, XHTML
or XML. The only viewing software that implemented all
of them was the now-defunct FrameViewer product.

WHAT I PROPOSE INSTEAD is that Adobe provide a new
version of FrameMaker that includes (in addition to
all the existing link types) the new types specified
in the XLink standard, and also provide an upgraded
version of Acrobat that can, when a FrameMaker file is
saved as PDF, preserve all those link types. 

PDF has already become a de-facto web standard because
of its superior readability, bookmarks, thumbnails,
and forms capabilities. Adding all of FrameMaker’s
superior hyperlink capabilities to PDF would vastly
expand penetration into web content and on-line help
development. And FrameMaker would replace Robohelp,
Winhelp and similar products as the publishing system
of choice for delivering web and on-line help content
as PDF.

Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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