FrameMaker

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FrameMaker

Adobe FrameMaker v11 icon.png
Basic data

developer Adobe Inc.
Current  version 2019.0.5
( February 11, 2020 )
operating system Windows
programming language C.
License proprietary
German speaking Yes
Adobe FrameMaker Homepage

FrameMaker is a professional authoring tool for the administration and print-oriented presentation of technical documents , which was originally developed and sold by the company Frame Technologies ; Adobe Inc. took over the company in the mid-1990s .

FrameMaker was originally developed for the SunOS operating system from Sun and was later ported to the Apple Macintosh and Windows platforms along with many Unix systems . The Macintosh port has not been further developed since 2004. Today FrameMaker is only available for Microsoft Windows.

FrameMaker is the leading program for creating technical documentation today.

properties

The strengths of the program lie in the area of technical documentation , which can comprise many thousands of pages. In the mathematical and scientific environment, FrameMaker is a viable alternative to LaTeX because of its practical formula set implementation . FrameMaker also has good support for creating SGML and XML documents.

FrameMaker is a program for creating and editing complex and high-quality layouted documents with semi-automatically generated directories (table of contents, index, etc.), cross-references, stable handling of imported images and output options for all requirements in the field of sophisticated technical documentation.

The features of FrameMaker can be expanded by programming your own plug-ins with the FrameMaker Developer's Kit (in C ++ ). FrameScript (in Germany: ElmScript), a scripting language for FrameMaker, offers similar possibilities ; many scripts are freely available from relevant websites or lists. From version 10, FrameMaker brings its own scripting language (based on JavaScript) with ExtendScript, including an editor environment, for which a large number of free or commercial scripts are also available.

Up to version 7.2 the program worked internally with the Macintosh Roman character set and therefore had difficulties with non-Latin fonts. The FrameMaker font engine is Unicode- enabled from version 8.0 and also enables publication e.g. B. Indian texts, if appropriate fonts are installed. As of version 13.0, FrameMaker supports the publication of texts in languages ​​that are set from right to left (Arabic, Hebrew).

Program development

Charles "Nick" Corfield began writing a WYSIWYG editor on a Sun 2 workstation while studying astrophysics at Columbia University . The suggestion came from his roommate Ben Meiry, who saw a market for a professional DTP program.

The only DTP program at the time was Interleaf , which also ran on Sun workstations , but had a number of restrictions. While Meiry took care of the technology and the connections, Corfield developed the algorithms . After a few months, a stable prototype of FrameMaker was created. A Sun Microsystems salesman liked the program and Corfield allowed him to use FrameMaker as a graphics demo on Sun computers.

Steve Kirsch recognized the potential of FrameMaker and founded Frame Technology Corp. with Corfield (and others) to bring the program to market. FrameMaker became a popular technical documentation writing program and was soon making money. Originally written for SunOS (a variant of Unix), FrameMaker was ported to the Apple Macintosh , which was selling very well at the time.

In the early 1990s, several Unix workstation manufacturers ( Apollo , Data General , MIPS , Motorola, and Sony ) funded porting for their devices. At the height of its success, FrameMaker could be used on over 13 UNIX platforms, including AIX from IBM and NeXTStep . At that point, FrameMaker was making it possible for authors to produce high quality documents with good typography .

Frame Technology later ported FrameMaker to Windows . Up to this point in time, target customers were professional authors of extensive and highly technical publications (e.g. a maintenance manual for the Boeing 777 ); Accordingly, cost FrameMaker 2,500  US dollars per license. However, the Windows version was offered for $ 500, which made the program affordable for private users, but this destroyed the previously fairly uniform customer profile . The complex FrameMaker was far too intensive to learn for private users. The lack of the expected sales brought the company to the brink of ruin.

FrameMaker was eventually bought by Adobe Inc. and sales were directed back to professional customers. However, the further development of the software was slow: After the introduction of macOS , Adobe neglected the Macintosh platform and finally gave it up completely in 2004. The current version only supports Microsoft Windows.

The program versions "FrameMaker" and "FrameMaker + SGML" (formerly FrameBuilder; very expensive; mainly used in aviation), which were initially sold separately, were merged with FrameMaker 7 in 2002 to form a single version. Since then, during the installation (and later) you can decide whether to work with "FrameMaker" or "Structured FrameMaker" (XML-based).

In the area of ​​technical documentation, FrameMaker had a number of competing products, but all of them disappeared from the market with the growing popularity of Microsoft Word .

Versions

  • 1987 FrameMaker 1.0 (February 25, 1987) - for Sun2 or Sun3 under SunOS> = 2.0 (PN 81-00100-00)
  • 1988 FrameMaker 1.11b - for SunOS (later Solaris) and Apollo
  • 1989 FrameMaker 2.0 and 2.1 - Version 2.1 runs on OSF / Motif. New are the paragraph and character designer, the equation editor (as it still exists today), the management of cross-references and generated lists at book level.
  • 1990: Ported to Apple Macintosh
  • 1991: FrameMaker 3.0 - new are tables, hypertext, improved book functions.
  • 1992: Porting to Windows. Sun introduces FrameBuilder, a version of FrameMaker with SGML support.
  • 1993: FrameMaker 4.0 - new are change bars, margin columns, subheadings (paragraph in the same line) and improved table management.
  • 1995/96: FrameMaker 5.0 / 5.12 - first version from Adobe. FrameMaker + SGML replaces FrameBuilder. Online help, long file name support in Windows 95 , OLE support, saving in HTML format and inserting text for reference are new .
  • 1997/98 FrameMaker 5.5 / 5.5.6 - First version for Linux, which is not published due to lack of demand. At the beginning of 2000 there was version 5.5.6 as a free test version for Linux, the duration of which was limited to December 31, 2000. Last version for IRIX. New are drag and drop in dialogs, Japanese version with corresponding character support, support for PDFMarks (thereby automatically inserting bookmarks, links and cross-references in PDF files), color libraries (DIC, Focaltone, Munsell, Pantone, Toyo and Trumatch), language property for Paragraph and character designer and sorting function in the table designer
  • 2000: FrameMaker 6.0 - New are the revised user manual, search / replace in the book, spell check, improved numbering system in the book, improved document comparison and bundling with Quadralay WebWorks Publisher.
  • 2002 FrameMaker 7.0 - Last version for Macintosh (OS 8/9), HP / UX and IBM AIX. FrameMaker 7.1 for Unix uses PDFLib and is therefore independent of Distiller. FrameMaker is now a combined version for SGML and unstructured documents. New features include support for XML, correction of the Save as PDF function, support for tagged PDF, improved headers / footers and document information in XMP format
  • 2003: FrameMaker 7.1 - only for Windows / Solaris. The bundling with Adobe Distiller 6, additional OpenType fonts and the import of QuarkXPress and PageMaker files are new.
  • 2005: FrameMaker 7.2 - New are multiple undos, bundling with support for DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) and bundling with WebWorks 8 and Distiller 7 (the Unix version uses PDFLib here).
  • 2007: FrameMaker 8.0 - The complete Unicode implementation as well as the extended support (hyphenation and spelling aids) of numerous languages ​​(ie Baltic languages ​​(Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian), CE languages ​​(Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian) as well as Greek, Russian and Turkish). Also new are the ability to integrate Flash and 3D, improved DITA support, track changes similar to Word, extended support for "conditional texts", an import filter for 2007 Office Word and Excel and a "tabbed bar", the "Tab" for the open documents.
  • 2009: FrameMaker 9.0 - New and noticeable is the completely redesigned user interface, which now largely resembles the appearance of the Adobe Creative Suite; many formerly modal dialogs are now available as permanently open (non-modal) so-called pods. In addition, the arrangement and selection of the open pods can be saved and retrieved in the workplace settings. Further changes: CMYK color support, support for DITA 1.1 and DITA 1.2, hierarchical structure in the book function, import of PDF comments, various optimizations for the cooperation with content management systems.
  • 2011: FrameMaker 10.0 - New are some improvements in the handling, background color for texts (highlighting) and an on-the-fly spell check (as known from Microsoft Word ). Further changes: table format catalog, restricting and arranging the format catalogs, drag and drop for texts, search for format overrides, own script language ExtendScript. For structured documents there are: improved tag view, attribute editor, wizards for creating structure applications , CMS connection to EMC Documentum and SharePoint as well as support for DITA 1.2 and S1000D .
There is also the server- based version "FrameMaker 10.0 Server", which enables the automated publication of documents in various formats (with a CMS connection).
  • 2012: FrameMaker 11.0
  • The most striking new feature is the new XML source code editor, syntax highlighting , code folding, context aware element auto suggest, tag auto-close, tree view, search / replace with regular expressions , XSLT 2.0 and XPATH 2.0 (including a query builder ) Provides support.
  • The standard installed parsers for XSLT are XALAN and SAXON . You can add your own JAXP-compatible XSLT processors.
  • An "Authoring View" enables the creation of XML-based content in a WYSIWYG-like, but reduced, environment.
  • The new "Smart Paste" function enables content from HTML websites and Microsoft Word documents to be inserted directly into a DITA document using copy & paste. The content is converted directly into valid DITA-XML. The Smart Paste function is based on XSLT and can be adapted for your own XML structures.
  • Improved support for video and other multimedia content. Among other things, the support of the ECMA U3D standard in version 3.0 is new .
  • Object styles. Objects such as graphic frames can now also be assigned styles.
  • The user interface can be adapted via "Workspaces". Different workspaces are provided and you can create your own.
  • The search & replace function has been upgraded with various functions and line numbers can be displayed to the left of the text frame. In addition, the CMS Connection Manager has been upgraded.
  • 2014: FrameMaker 12.0
  • 2015: FrameMaker (2015 Release) - [New versioning scheme based on years; (internal FrameMaker 13.0)]
  • Completely revised font engine, which now also enables work with right-to-left ("left-handed") languages ​​such as Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew. The font engine is bi-directional and therefore enables the mixing of right-hand and left-hand text even within a paragraph. The layout of a document can be mirrored with one click. Support for bi-directional text is also included in the XML source code editor. Thai is now also supported.
  • Support for complex script languages. With the new font engine, Vietnamese, Hindi, Bengali, Telugu and numerous other languages ​​can be processed in FrameMaker.
  • New Word import filter. Dialog-based paragraph and character formats from Word can now be "mapped" into FrameMaker styles.
  • Mini-Tocs within a document can now be inserted into chapter tables of contents, which are automatically updated when the book is updated.
  • Numerous improvements were made to the user interface. Among other things, almost all dialogs that previously had fixed sizes can now be resized, color shades in tables are now displayed over the full area instead of pixelated, table navigation has been improved, rows and columns can be moved using drag & drop (also in Structured FrameMaker ), Table columns can now also be provided with conditions.
  • Support for DITA 1.3
  • Multi-channel publishing has been expanded. The following outputs are now possible in total:
  • PDF
  • Responsive HTML5
  • Mobile apps (iOS, Android)
  • WebHelp
  • ePub
  • Kindle
  • Microsoft HTML Help
  • Adobe Digital Publishing Solution (DPS)
  • 2017: FrameMaker 2017 (internal FrameMaker 14)
  • Lots of changes to the user interface; Changes to the menus
  • 2019: FrameMaker 2019 (internal FrameMaker 15)

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ FrameMaker for Windows. Retrieved February 17, 2020 .
  2. ↑ New Downloads. 2000, accessed February 17, 2020 .
  3. ↑ Security Updates Available for Adobe Framemaker | APSB20-04. February 11, 2020, accessed on February 17, 2020 .