Adobe Kills FrameMaker for Mac 544
Feneric writes "As noted on FrameUsers.com, FrameMaker for the Mac was officially killed by Adobe. Of course, since one of the primary selling points of FrameMaker is its wonderfully solid cross-platform MS-Windows / Macintosh / Unix support, many are now wondering how long it'll now last for any platform."
Not "any" platform.. (Score:3, Insightful)
"[...] many are now wondering how long it'll now last for any platform."
I think the real question is "how long it'll last for any platform other than Windows?"
Sad.
Re:Not "any" platform.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmm, yes. There are certainly many more Solaris boxes than Macs. (I'm guessing that the Solaris customers are Big Companies and willing to pay through the nose for support?)
Only Solaris option? (Score:4, Informative)
This is one of a very few (WP/DP) programs specifically for Solaris (for those who don't think of Tex as easy to install/use). Thus, even though there are more installed Macs than Solaris workstations, they may well have a bigger Solaris market.
The thing that confuses me is that now that Macs are BSD based, shouldn't it be relatively simple to port the Solaris version to MacOSX?
Re:Only Solaris option? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Only Solaris option? (Score:3, Insightful)
Exactly. I had that experience today firing up The GIMP 2 under OS X today for the first time. It's the first time that I've fired up any X app other than an x-term (never had any need to) and the dichotomy between the two UI's made me want to puke.
So, I quit GIMP, fired up Photoshop and give it a big electronic hug.
Re:Only Solaris option? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Only Solaris option? (Score:5, Insightful)
Not at all; the difficulty is not in the POSIX bits - read/write/open/close - but in the GUI. A well behaved Mac app needs to use unique Apple API's correctly, such as Cocoa. Besides, support can be a bigger issue than initial porting. I know of products that could be ported to Linux in a heartbeat, except that the support issues scare the owners.
Anyhow, Frame is essentially a corporate product and corporations have not accepted the Mac to any great extent. It's used in graphic arts, prepress, etc. but most IT departments would rather avoid them. The Mac mostly sells to consumers and independent professionals.
Re:Only Solaris option? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not "any" platform.. (Score:4, Informative)
I haven't worked there in a while - but a lot of the other teams supported products that probably had fewer calls with products that had far more problems. Well over 75% of all the calls I took were tech writers using windows - the rest of them Unix (usually Solaris) and Mac - even then I didn't have to take very many calls on the product.
Even then it suprises me they stopped supporting it - since I never recalled any real support issues other then the fact it was an OS8/OS9 app (it ran just fine in X) its not like it was hard to support or anything and it really didn't have any major issues. The Unix version was pretty monolithic compared to many Unix apps. A great example of this is adding fonts to Framemaker [adobe.com] which also shows how Frame handles fonts (this doc applies to Frame 7 and 7.1 too except they can use opentype fonts as well)
What is Framemaker? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know what Framemaker is used for, exactly, so maybe that's a silly question.
Re:Not "any" platform.. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not "any" platform.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:MOD DOWN -1, DUMBASS (Score:4, Interesting)
LaTeX? (Score:3, Insightful)
Truly cross-platform, professional page layout, incredibly smart fonts and free! Stop chaining yourself to proprietary shit that can get killed any day.
Re:LaTeX? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LaTeX? (Score:3, Insightful)
(as if using a GUI to figure out how to get templates to work correctly in MS Word was any easier)
Re:LaTeX?---That is what LyX solves: WYSIWYM (Score:4, Informative)
LyX --LaTeX for What You See is What You Mean Document Processing.
LyX 1.4 is coming along splendidly and is becoming much more intuitive, daily.
LyX 1.3.4 is excellent, flexible, extensible and quite intuitive with a buttload of Free Support from the LyX User List.
LyX for Mac is Qt compliant--Ronald Florence maintains the port. I'm looking into what it would require to do a Cocoa port but I can't imagine it would take much to do.
Try the damn software out. It is the one I use for writing Novels, Tech Publications, etc on Linux and OS X.
When I want to do Graphic Layout I'm using Scribus for Linux--growing better daily and quite useable with CMYK Color Separations, Secure PDF Exportations, etc.
Hell get smart and try Create! (Stone Studio [stone.com]). My friend Andrew Stone knows Document Publishing, Graphics Design and Layout. He even works with PStill Creator (PStill PS/EPS to PDF 256Bit Encrypted Conversion [pstill.com]), Frank Siegert and has a wonderful PStill Utility for OS X.
If you can't grasp Create's Power than you've got issues
Free Upgrades for Life! Not to mention Andrew is one of the most talented, seasoned and professional individuals you'll ever speak with or meet. Great Company and Family. Highly respected since the early NeXT Days and now Apple Days.
Sincerely, Marc J. DriftmeyerRe:LaTeX?-L:yx. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:LaTeX?-L:yx. (Score:5, Insightful)
That deal for the products did cost money, just not money out of *your* pocket.
Re:LaTeX?-L:yx. (Score:3, Insightful)
There are rules for typesetting documents. TeX (and by extension, LaTeX) uses those rules. Word is like a plastic hammer and toolbelt for children compared to TeX's professional Estwing.
tracking changes/version control?
This is not the job of a word processor.
Re:LaTeX?-L:yx. (Score:3, Informative)
Nope, by all means write your own - it's not that hard. I wrote up some company standard document classes at one company I worked at, providing a standardised (but very different from the standard TeX look) for all company documents produced in TeX. The
Re:LaTeX?-L:yx. (Score:3, Interesting)
So, the work of your students just screams out: "THIS DOCUMENT WAS LAID OUT IN MS WORD!"?. Because trust me, the page layout of a default Word template is instantly recognisable to anyone with the slightest knowledge of typography and layout (For one, it's f*cking ugly).
Or do your students create those documents full of different typefaces, dis
Re:LaTeX?-L:yx. (Score:3, Insightful)
Minipages, parboxes, and styles like floatflt all make complex figure placement quite painless (certainly no harder than complex figure placement in MS Word). As for version control and change tracking - given that latex is pure text it is pretty damn easy to keep latex files in CVS which provides far better version con
Re:LaTeX?-L:yx. (Score:4, Informative)
By primitive GUI I assume you mean Lyx has structure.
Why do you want to do things the hardest way possible (using an MS Word style interface) when there are easier way to accomplish your task? It's pretty easy to overlay your notes over a PS or DVI, notes written in your favorite text editor, WYSIWYG editor or paint program.
With PDF it's even easier. If you have Adobe Acrobat (the full version) you can insert comments and highlight and draw ontop of a PDF. (it's a WYSIWYG + simple paint program combined). I find acrobat to be a very simple way to review documents. And it doesn't matter if they used LaTeX, troff or MS Word to do it. As long as I get them all as PS or PDF then I can review them.
You made the assumption that the reviewer had to use the same software as the authors. The conflict you have is because authoring documents and reviewing documents are very different tasks and some software is better than others for doing one task or another.
Re:LaTeX? (Score:2, Informative)
2. No support for generation of press-ready PDF's. That is to say, no PDF/X support at all.
3. No support for managed color separations.
4. No XML->TeX pathway, which means it can't integrate with modern authoring workflows.
5. No stylesheet support, unless you count writing macros. Which I don't. Writing macros has more in common with symbolic math than it does with graphic des
Re:LaTeX? (Score:5, Informative)
As for SGML/XML->TeX, you should look into the Jade project.
As for stylesheets, TeX has had them for decades, but yes they involve writing macros, unless LyX has a GUI for it; I don't see this as a disadvantage.
As for "half-decent" documents, TeX/LaTeX have helped produce thousands of books, papers, reports, articles and so on for nigh on 20 years.
Re:LaTeX? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:LaTeX? (Score:5, Insightful)
Point by point refutation of parent post here...
Point 1: "Utterly useless for 75% of the world that doesn't use the American alphabet."
Point 1 refutation: Bullshit. I have personally typeset texts in Japanese, Korean, and Hebrew in LaTeX. Support for Sanskrit and Elvish are easy to find if you look at CTAN. You can imagine that anything in between those extremes is drop-dead simple.
Point 2: "No support for press-ready PDF, that is to say no support for PDF/X at all."
Point 2 refutation: Bullshit. I use pdflatex on a daily basis, and the guys and gals at the print shop consistently compliment me on the resulting PDFs. teTeX, the dominant TeX/LaTeX distribution, includes many tools for converting to and tweaking output for a number of different formats.
Point 3: "No support for managed color separations."
Point 3 refutation: Who gives a damn? The strong point of TeX/LaTeX is typesetting mathematical papers, and when Knuth wrote it, it was in simple frustration that his books looked like crap after being put through the preceding technology. The fact that it can be used for other things is a bonus.
Point 4: "No XML->TeX pathway."
Point 4 refutation: Try Google. Not to mention that even a beginning programmer can figure out how to parse XML into LaTeX or TeX after an afternoon of looking at the two. At this point I have to wonder if you aren't talking completely out your ass.
Point 5: "No stylesheet support, unless you count writing macros. Which I don't. Writing macros has more in common with symbolic math than it does with graphic design."
Point 5 refutation: Gee, what are all these foo.sty files all around my texmf directory? They may be macros, but using LaTeX, pretty much all of the macros have been written for you. Not to mention that if you're trying to use LaTeX or TeX for graphic design, you are a moron. Use the tool for its strengths, not for its weaknesses -- design your graphics in another program, save them in one of the half-dozen or more acceptable formats for LaTeX, and use any of the four graphic inclusion/positioning packages that come standard with any TeX distribution. At this point, I'm almost positive that you're a troll, so I won't bother posting this under my user account.
Point 6: "Only rudimentary support for contone and vector graphics. No intelligent text wrap, for example."
Point 6 refutation: I don't contest the first sentence -- I have already refuted it above. Save your freaking diagram out from another program (I personally recommend xfig and tgif for diagramming) and include it in your LaTeX document using one of the standard packages. As for your assertion that there is no intelligent text wrap, you are clearly on glue. Try actually USING it before you decide that -- not only is the text wrap great, but the justification is top-notch, and the hyphenation understands about two dozen different languages. Beats the living hell out of Frame, Quark, InDesign, and the crowd. And yes, I've used them before.
Point 7: "You CANNOT use it to generate a half-decent document..."
Point 7 refutation: Please piss up a rope. No one is trying to make you use it. You don't even have to like it. Just don't try to confuse your not liking it with it not being a good way to go.
Re:LaTeX? (Score:3, Informative)
I'd like to point out one can find actual examples which support the above well-reasoned refuation at http://www.tug.org/texshowcase (ob. discl. I've got some stuff in that).
William
Re:LaTeX? (Score:3, Informative)
?? Can you elaborate? One can typeset documents in Bulgarian in Latex, for instance, and they look as good as they can be. Sure, there is some pain in making it work with character coding cp1251, sure, it does not support Unicode, but the implication you quote above is simply nonsense. I can find examples for you, if you don't believe me, that it is possible to create a Cyrillic do
Re:LaTeX? (Score:3, Informative)
No GUI layout, as far as I know
Lyx [lyx.org] comes to mind.
A pain to learn and use.
No more difficult than HTML for most tasks. Significantly easier for some and a bit more finicky for others.
Just can't win. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Just can't win. (Score:2)
Re:Just can't win. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Just can't win. (Score:3, Insightful)
So lets see now.... (Score:2)
Re:So lets see now.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So lets see now.... (Score:2, Informative)
Never updated for OS X (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Never updated for OS X (Score:3, Interesting)
Bad business, when you are at the mercy of your customer coming to you.
So instead we make sure to keep VERY up to date. On the other hand we also have an OS9 and a Windows box chugging along with a whole slew of old out
Is this really of any serious consequence? (Score:3, Interesting)
(you + people_you_know) != world (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't heard anyone say they are using Framemaker for serious development of anything in years.
That's because FM is not a general-purpose Joe-and-Jane office worker word processor: FM's strengths lie in really large documents, like books and other things that are over ~200 pages. Not many people have a need for that. FM on Solaris (SPARC) is a very nifty combination.
You and your acquaintances are not a statistically significant sample set.
Re:Is this really of any serious consequence? (Score:3, Informative)
Bullshit, it's the tech writing industry standard! (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, tech writers seem to march to the Microsoft drummer in general. I doubt many will care about Frame for OSX.
Harumph! (Score:4, Funny)
- Tash
Re:Harumph! (Score:4, Interesting)
It never ran on OS X. So that answers that question.
Sort of. Problem is, they had a Linux version three years ago. FrameMaker on Linux [adobe.com].
So the mystery deepens. What the fuck happened to Frame on Linux, and if Adobe could port from Solaris to Linux three years ago, surely they can port from Solaris to OS X (and Solaris to Linux) today.
I can see the market for Frame on Linux being pretty small in 2000 -- anyone with $800 to spend on software probably wasn't using Linux as a desktop. I can't see that argument holding water today. And that goes double for OS X.
Re:uhmmmm (Score:3, Insightful)
If it runs on Solaris, why not a Linux version? They're practically the same thing!
ok, I know, it was bad, but it had to be said.
Re:uhmmmm (Score:2)
$800 for page layout? (Score:5, Interesting)
If they sold it for $99, they'd probably make more money.
Re:$800 for page layout? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:$800 for page layout? (Score:4, Interesting)
After taking a class back in college on using FrameMaker... I fell in love, the power and control it gives you over a document is... amazing. As an example... open up a magazine or catalog sometime... look in detail at the arrangement of the various pictures and text through out the page... now imagine how you might do that in something like Microsoft Word, or some other word processor... Even in Latex perhaps.
Head done spinning?
Give that page to someone who has learned a few tutorials in FrameMaker and they can do it quite quickly for you.
If I could afford it, I would have a copy of FM both at home and work, I would not write anything more complicated then a letter to a friend in my normal word processor... anything else, Memos, memorandums, proposals, etc, all would be done in FM.
Re:$800 for page layout? (Score:4, Insightful)
FYI: Any magazine or catalog you open will be produced either in Quark (most of them) or InDesign (a few). Framemaker has a very small, very select market, for which it is a superior product. For anything else it's a pain in the ass.
Re:$800 for page layout? (Score:3, Insightful)
Interleaf was the first good WYSIWYG word processor/page editor/publication builder program. It came out in the early 1980s, and originally ran on SUN workstations. Interleaf wanted to sell you a $60,000 bundle with Interleaf, a workstation and a laser printer, so they didn't sell very many units. But, eventually, there were Mac and Windows versions.
Interleaf remained a niche product for almost two decade
frames? (Score:2, Funny)
and the idea of a special app for making frames - that's completely nuts. adobe should have done this years ago.
Payback (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Payback (Score:2)
No. (Score:2)
this is just Adobe sucking ass to Microsoft.
Re:No. (Score:2, Insightful)
I think it's Adobe finally getting sick of giving Apple all their ideas for iRippoff iApps, particularly after being such a stauch supporter through the roughest years. Nah, they're sucking up to Microsoft, that's the ticket. Couldn't be anything anyone else did, all the evil in the world is always tr
Re:No. (Score:3, Insightful)
Hey, if Adobe wanted to be treated decently by Apple, perhaps they should stop labeling Windows PCs as their "preferred platform of choice." And Adobe sucking up to Microsoft will only cause them to become the next SpyGlass; after all, it is Microsoft, NOT Apple, that is trying to kill off the PDF file format for more proprietary versions
I don't think this is the first time... (Score:5, Insightful)
In any case, it would seem difficult for a company to justify splitting its development resources between two competing products. FrameMaker users surely must have (or should have) seen this coming.
Re:I don't think this is the first time... (Score:5, Informative)
It was only when old-schoolers refused to change over to the new app that Adobe decided to keep PageMaker around for a while longer [rightly so, InDesign 1 sucked, and was *not* a Quark killer that they promised it would be].
Re:I don't think this is the first time... (Score:3, Informative)
Pagemaker: Executive Secretary and home stuff(Kinda like Photoshop Elements), wants something prettier than MS Word, or they already know Pagemaker. Still supported on Mac OS with a carbonized Pagemaker 7
InDesign: Direct competition with Quark, Finally serious competition with InDesign 3.
Framemaker: Large Technical documents with LOTS of references, standard formatting, stuff that BIG companies and their vendors care about.
There
Re:I don't think this is the first time... (Score:2)
Expected (Score:5, Informative)
Before you whine too much, consider this (Score:5, Insightful)
Adobe is a company that needs to make money to survive (like all companies). If a product isn't selling well enought, it will get killed.
So the fault isn't squarely on Adobes shoulders in this - the particular segment of the market that Framemaker for Mac catered to just isn't big enought for the software to keep selling...
On the lighter side, this must be a wonderfull opertunity for the Open Source Software to show that it can deliver somethign just as good for the Mac, right?
Re:Before you whine too much, consider this (Score:5, Insightful)
Adobe's Official FAQ (Score:4, Informative)
Not dead (Score:2, Funny)
No Frame for Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm not disappointed, I hate using Frame.
Komi
Re:No Frame for Linux (Score:2, Informative)
Re:No Frame for Linux (Score:4, Informative)
You may also need the information in this post [google.com] (unless the hack has already been applied).
- Brian.
OK FrameMaker is dying but what's killing it? (Score:2)
That FrameMaker has been killed on Apple clearly means it's sales there much be utterly miniscule because the incremental development for that platform should be relatively minor.
frame was a good app... (Score:5, Informative)
The Solaris version may continue to survive, as some RIPs are still running on Solaris, and it is helpful to have the app on that platform [and they can charge *much* more for each seat... take a look at what Adobe charged for Photoshop on SGI/IRIX and compare it to the Mac/Win version].
It is always sad when a large company drops a product for an OS, but if the audience isn't there, why bother? Smart move on Adobe's part.
But but (Score:2)
Isn't Unix what powers OS-X? I'm no specialist of the Mac word, but it seems to me that if something works on Unix, it has a fair chance of working under OS-X/Mac too, no?
Upgrade path from Mac to Windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
Macromedia has done a great thing in packaging MX2004 with both Mac and Windows versions in the same box -- I can upgrade any of my systems -- mac, or windows -- and use the software on the fastest box in my studio.
Software makers have been telling us for decades that hardware is a commodity and software is what's important. It's about time that the liscensing model changes to reflect that.
This is a great chance for Adobe to do just that. I hope they do.
Writing was on the wall when 7 was for Classic (Score:5, Interesting)
Unfortunately, Lighthouse Design, the company which ported FrameMaker 2 and 3 to NeXTstep got bought by Sun, so Adobe didn't even have that option of outsourcing the port.
For those searching for an alternative, LyX, http://www.lyx.org is _very_ nice, esp. the nifty new QT version for Aqua.
There's also a script to convert from FrameMaker's Maker Interchange Format (MIF) to LyX.
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~pablo/mif2lyx/
InDesign lacks the industrial-strength SGML stuff w/ FrameMaker has, so isn't an option. Pagemaker has also been buried (but at least InDesign is a viable alternative for it w/ the nifty script pack / additions Adobe announced recently).
xmltex is another good thing to use, or of course one can roll one's own XML publishing solutions w/ TeX.
William
Re:Writing was on the wall when 7 was for Classic (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, The Omni Group [omnigroup.com] did the Framemaker port to NeXTSTEP. You can still see a reference to it on their jobs page [omnigroup.com] under the "What's Omni Like?" heading. If Adobe wanted to put forth the money, The Omni Group could do the port.
Obsolete decision (Score:2, Insightful)
made by technically incompetent people who
do not understand that OSX is a variant of
Unix (in the API compatibility sense, rather
than the trademark sense).
Re:Obsolete decision (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently said person has never actually had any experience with porting software in their lives?
Re:Obsolete decision (Score:3, Interesting)
cross-platoform GUIs on MacOS (pre OSX),
Win32 and X11/Unix since the advent of Win32
(the youngest of the three platforms).
While my OSX experience is limited, I am
at least aware that the OSX platform now
includes X11 support.
a useful product with no substitute (Score:4, Interesting)
Framemaker was ideal for producing technical documents which require:
* paragraph style numbering, so that sections may be shuffled and all the numbered chapters, headers, subheads would automatically update
* incremental table and figure numbering
* cross-references, table of contents and figures which automatically update
* variables embedded in text
InDesign would be an excellent substitute if several of these features were implemented. I guess I'll have to keep the old version of MacOS9 Framemaker around until someone comes out with a substitute for this product.
Re:a useful product with no substitute (Score:3, Interesting)
Frame and Ventura were excellent for that kind of stuff. It's too bad that Corel got Ventura and tried to turn it in to a PageMa
Let me get this straight (Score:3, Insightful)
Decent app, too expensive (Score:2, Informative)
No mystery there (Score:5, Insightful)
From the Adobe Framemaker FAQ on the article [adobe.com] "A. It is our policy to not comment on the size of our user base. However, sales of FrameMaker licenses have been greater on the Windows and Solaris platforms for a number of years." They spelled it out and no tinfoil hat conspiracy.
You may never see Framemaker on an open source platform. The primary use for Framemaker is technical documentation for publication. Some of the deadtreeware available for open source project certainly was composed in Framemaker. However, the majority of open source projects are not at the stage (and may never be) where someone makes the effort to publish documentation.
And then remember a large number of Framemaker users work as software technical writers for closed source software companies. So do not hold your breath for the free software version.
Framemaker is one of the few pieces of software, open or closed source, that paid more than lip service to XML. A structured Framemaker document is a pure XML document with a real DTD. So not only is it well formed, but also (*gasp of disbelief*) Valid!
This is the second major Mac app Adobe cancelled (Score:3, Informative)
I don't think that similar app on the Mac side that does this, but do many people really use FrameMaker more than other tools?
FrameMaker for Unix *is* Mac-usable.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Unless and until Adobe kills the Unix versions of FrameMaker, there's a Mac-usable version out there.
This saddens me, though. I'm a technical writer and can't imagine having to do books with Microsoft Word. Word is not suitable for long technical documents, period. It *breaks* when you try to do complex things with it. I'm planning to switch to a Mac with my personal computer, and just hope that I won't be reduced to running FrameMaker under a Windoze emulator.
OpenOffice is the one to beat (Score:3, Interesting)
Not a Big Surprise Considering How Poor Upgrades R (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are a Tech Writer or working in desktop publishing firm (the type that issues books rather than newsletters) in any serious capacity, chances are good that you've at least run across Frame, and if you are like me, use it pretty much on a daily basis.
I started using the Unix version first, prior to it being bought out by Adobe, sometime in the mid-90s. I've written books for a book publisher that ultimately *had* to be in Frame format, and many tech writers I know use it. So the fact that it has less than 1% market penetration isn't surprising -- it's always been a niche product.
What I don't find surprising is the fact that Adobe is dropping support for the Mac platform. I came back to Frame 7 recently and was surprised to see how little had been changed since the last time I used it extensively back in the late-90s. While Adobe *has* made some improvements to the product (primarily to just barely keep it usable in the Internet age), but it still has one of the worst UIs going for a commercial product. Embarrasing-looking 8-bit graphical buttons that make the product look cheap, multiple dialogs needed for handling a single task (such as table formatting), and the fact that pretty much anything of use besides basic text formatting is lumped into a single "Special" drop-down menu. And you have to love the dialogs whose windows you can resize without actually resizing the window's contents, which smacks of poor QA. There isn't a day that goes by that I don't curse Adobe for making the barest UI improvements to their product. So to me the announcement about dropping the Mac platform says that Adobe is continuing to neglect this product.
What it does it does well, but increasingly the headaches of the poor UI and the fact that you have to get plug-ins to do what ought to be built-in functions (decent indexing comes to mind; I can buy a good product from IxGen but why has it never been built into Frame?) leads to more frustrations that is necessary for a product that commands a premium price (currenly $799).
I am in a position to make recommendations on software purchases, and unless Adobe becomes serious about its upgrade to Frame (the 7.1 "upgrade" for $199 was laughable) I wouldn't recommend we continue with this product. Give me something that works cleanly in XML, indexes well, with tie-ins to a database structure, that produces decent HTML output and handles markers, variables and all of the "special" functions that Frame builds in and I'll sign up for it in a jiffy.
Re:Not a Big Surprise Considering How Poor Upgrade (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I've moved to using ReST, DocUtils, and proprietary XSL:FO to create PDFs. It rules.
FrameMaker? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've always used PageMaker, Illustrator and Photoshop.
Photoshop, oddly enough, was not originally designed with the print industry in mind until John and Thomas Knoll from Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic had sold it to Adobe.
Adobe's definitely feeling a kick in the pants from Apple...
Apple's developers, being far more ingenious at developing intuitive and user-friendly interfaces, has vastly improved acquired applications such as Shake and DVD Studio Pro.
As a result of an explosion in digital cinematography and editing, people with advanced programming skills are harder to find, and therefore there's a greater need for user-friendly, robust apps on the superlative media platform.
Adobe has been riding high on Photoshop for years, and I find that particularly interesting since neither was Photoshop their product (it was invented by Thomas and John Knoll, of Lucasfilm's Industrial Light & Magic), nor was it ever marketed by Adobe for the purpose for which it was invented... digital matte artistry and frame-by-frame image correction in motion pictures.
Unfortunately, they haven't really delivered on other products...Newer versions of Premiere had odd compatibility problems with various DV cameras, various interface bugs, a very poor titling tool that crashes frequently... Premiere Pro seems a desperate attempt to recover market share lost to Apple's vastly superior Final Cut Pro, imitating almost every major feature set of Final Cut Pro that was conspicuously absent in the standard version of Premiere.
As for After Effects... That application's edge was trumped when Apple acquired Shake, which has been used in Oscar-winning productions for seven straight years, including [i]Lord of the Rings[/i]... Shake is such an immensely powerful compositing system, it commands a sticker price four times that of After Effects Production Bundle. It's clear that Adobe's reign in the film and television industry is at its end... which means "Game Over" for one of their two primary target markets. So my response, as a content creator using Macs exclusively, to this and future missteps by Adobe in an effort to differentiate themselves from Apple who has all but entirely annihilated Adobe's market share... is, to quote Bender from The Breakfast Club, "B-O-O H-O-O."
Cry me a river...
If Apple ever plans to massively overhaul MacPaint and turns AppleWorks into a full-blown publishing suite, Adobe might as well file Chapter 11.
I wrote my thesis on FrameMaker (Score:3, Interesting)
Doing it all over again, I might have used LaTeX, but Frame was very powerful and never left me wanting for more power. Plus, getting started was easy and, unlike Word, it remained stable even as I included more and more figures, etc. I'm convinced that I'd still be in grad school if I stuck with MS Word. I've vowed never to use Word for a complicated document again. In short, FrameMaker rocked.
Re:Jobs need new Strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Jobs need new Strategy (Score:3, Insightful)
And while feature parity might indeed be equivalent between the apps on either platform, I've run in to a few pretty frustrating cache overflow, GID and system hang problems on Windows versions of Illustrator and PS that reminded me why 'real' designers use Macs >:D
Re:How can you kill something already dead? (Score:2)
Re:How can you kill something already dead? (Score:5, Insightful)
We've played with OpenOffice templates but there doesn't seem to be a real way to handle pulling together a document. TeX can do it but it would have a steep learning curve for something that isn't our primary purpose. I know TeX myself but I'm not about to be the one who gets tapped to teach it to everybody else (all the while still working hard at doing solid engineering work)
FrameMaker was painful in some ways, mostly because it wasn't "Just a word processor". Once that aspect was realized it was fairly painless however.
Interesting? (Score:3, Insightful)
You, sir, are an idiot. (Score:5, Insightful)
Think back to two years ago: do you think perhaps Adobe was swamped with DMCA-related questions?
Where exactly did you send your query? To a person or to a {help|info|webmaster|etc}@adobe address?
Was your question a FAQ? Did you bother to check?
To recap:
you sent email to a huge company
you didn't get a reply
feeling slighted, you sent a "less polite" email threatening to "boycott their products"
for some amazing reason, you didn't get a response to the second email
you took all this personally, and now are waging jihad against a company that doesn't know/care about your [alleged] lost business
Wow.
Re:Trust not closed source (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:LaTeX is the answer. (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a great TeX/LaTeX front end for OS X that I use called TeXShop. Aqua-friendly, set up to generate PDFs instead of DVIs by default, etc., etc.
Having said that, the people who've observed that FrameMaker is the industry standard for technical writing aren't kidding. TeX has its strongholds in academia and research, but go to any major commercial job board and search for technical writing positions. FrameMaker is almost guaranteed to not only be the most common document production system you run acro