Adobe FrameMaker 8.0 Review

by Bernard Aschwanden

An overview of new features, highlights, and personal rants about the newest tool for technical communicators

It's new

Adobe has released FrameMaker 8.0 and a whole technical communication suite to go with it. According to their website it’s “a flexible, user-friendly, enterprise-class authoring and publishing solution for technical communicators. It combines word processing and XML-based structured authoring with template-based publishing and powerful single-sourcing support to help you create polished technical documentation and books in multiple languages.”

That’s a lot of marketing in a few quick sentences. People want to know what’s actually new, what’s good and what’s not, and what’s worth paying the upgrade price for? In this article, I dive in a bit deeper to discuss features and my personal take on them.

Interface upgrades

Tab bar

The FrameMaker interface has a new look to it. Part of the new look includes a tab bar across the top when more than one file is open. The tabs display the names of open documents. It’s a nice feature and easy to use.

While this is a nice feature, it’s not a must-have for upgrading. I do like being able to see the names of several files, but I’d love to see more power added to the tab bar. It’s a fast way to navigate between a few open files, but if you open more than a dozen files it’s bulky and you end up tabbing around using traditional shortcuts.

Are you reading this, Adobe? I’d love to be able to drag and drop the order of the tabs, right-click in one and have more options, and generally have more than a horizontal list of open files. However, for a user who opens three, four, or even a dozen files, it’s a quick way to see what is open and navigate between documents.

Finally, if you don’t like the tab bar it’s easy to turn it off from the View menu.

On its own this likely isn’t enough to justify the cost of the upgrade, but combined with additional features it sure is nice to see.

Vista support

If you are one of the dozens of Vista users worldwide (okay, there may be hundreds by now) then this is great. If you are not on Vista, it’s not a problem. FrameMaker runs on Windows 2000 and on Windows XP. You can also run on Solaris UNIX. As with the past few versions though, there is no Macintosh support.

Vista support will become more important as Microsoft phases out more of the Windows XP software. Manufacturers of PCs will drop the option of a Windows XP install on a new system in the next year or so as well, so the Vista support is a forward-looking move by Adobe.

Adobe is doing some longer-term planning. This should help retain and grow the user base as companies upgrade their OS.

Save directly to PDF or XML

The File menu is updated to support File > Save and File > Save As just as in the past. However, you also can choose Save As > PDF or Save As > XML if you want. The Save Document dialogue appears and automatically selects the appropriate file type.

As a new feature, this is nice, but not crucial. As with other minor changes to the interface, this is a nice feature to have as a bonus to the full features of the new product.

But it is not worth the upgrade for this one alone.

Font menu improvements

This I like—quite a bit more than I thought I would early on. Of course, I do a lot of font work, so it may be of greater value to me than to you.

When you select any font related command (Format > Font or the Font option in the Paragraph or the Character Designer) the real font appearance is displayed when you roll over a font name. No more guessing what the font looks like.

Nice to have when you do not know for certain what the differences are between, say, Minion and Myriad, and you want to quickly identify the serif family. However, if you know your fonts well and do not use a large variety this may be a minor change for you. To remember each distinct font and its appearance is a lot of work for me. Now I don’t have to.

This is worth the upgrade for me as I work with multiple client files that use many fonts.

Dialog redesign

The majority of the dialog boxes in FrameMaker retain the same functions, but have been modified to add usability that I’ve wanted for a long time. While not perfect, this is a nice change.

As with most of the interface design changes, I don’t think this is worth the upgrade cost on its own, but it is nice to get when I buy the product for other reasons.

Menu changes

While the majority of the menu changes have been for the better, there are a few that you have to get used to. Stuff that really vexes me includes the decision to change existing keyboard shortcuts.

For example, when Adobe added the tab bar, the menu command of Alt-v-b (which would toggle the View for Borders) got hijacked. For the tab bar! Why would they do this? For years I’ve used the quick key combo on my PC to toggle borders on and off. Now I have to use Alt-v-o to activate the same function. That’s a lot of muscle memory gone.

While not a planet-ending change, it’s really frustrating to get to know a tool only to have some simple things yanked out from under you. Why this change? Why add a new function and then take over an existing menu command? Would it not have been easier just to come up with something else for the tab bar?

In the same way, the new Stucture menu creates some issues. If you were used to using the letter u to access Utilities in the old system, get used to the letter l instead. That’s right. The lowercase L is used for utilities. The letter U, it seems, has moved on to Set Structured Application.

It’s a headache, but not enough to switch me back to 7.x FrameMaker. Instead, I’ll just have to learn my shortcuts again. Sigh.

Working with other file types

Word 2007 import

If you happen to be one of the people who imports content from Word 2007, the cost of the upgrade may be worth it for this alone. Of course, you can also open the file in Word and save it to an older Word version. Then the older Word file can be opened in a legacy version of FrameMaker.

If you take advantage of Word 2007 and create content that contains UNICODE characters, consider FrameMaker 8.0 as a solution. Importing any UNICODE content (or creating it from scratch) can be done with the new release. This brings us to the next topic.

UNICODE support

Finally! Updated dialogues use UNICODE characters in the Find/Change dialogue. New dictionaries are included with support for UNICODE. You can even create a PDF where all your headings are written in a specific language and properly convert to bookmarks.

The bad news is that even now the support is not there for right-to-left languages. However, for content that is in Russian, Greek, or even Hindi you can work right in FrameMaker. It is not just typing either—dialogues also support the UNICODE character set.

If you are in need of UNICODE support, then the upgrade is worth the cost for that one feature alone.

Universal 3D and Flash

Support for universal 3D and Flash file import is now included. This allows either of the two file types to be imported and, upon conversion to PDF, supported in the Acrobat environment.

By doing so, Adobe has created a stronger bond between the Acrobat and the FrameMaker software. Models created in 3D drawing tools can be configured to allow the model to be rotated, zoomed, and even lit up from a variety of angles. Flash animations can be embedded and full activity retained in the final PDF.

Acrobat provides the fully featured Flash and 3D support, but don’t plan to activate any of the 3D or Flash features in FrameMaker. Instead, you need to save the file to a PDF first.

Finally, some of the people I’ve talked to find the feature to be nice. Really nice. But they don’t expect it to be used in their documentation simply because they don’t do 3D and Flash work or they don’t have the time and the budget to update content. Most users agree that they would like to incorporate these features, so the hope is that companies catch on. This really does change the way that people can work with a PDF document, and should be investigated.

For those who do use Flash or 3D models, this may be worth the upgrade.

Work smarter with content

Track text edits

This is not to be confused with the Microsoft Word feature Track Changes. Microsoft tracks a wide set of changes including formatting modifications, reorganization of content, layout modifications and more. Adobe tracks text edits.

This is a glorified version of conditional text that automatically inserts mark-up for content as it is added or deleted. It is a bit like a dynamic document comparison in FrameMaker. However, the enhanced set of options (including a toolbar to work through the document) available to manage the tracked content is really nice.

While the feature is nice, it is also a feature that competing tools have had (both Word and XMetaL already have similar features available) so it is not a showstopper. Other tools have more robust versions of this, so if it’s crucial, look elsewhere.

That said, it is nice to have this as an option. For people who have to do a lot of little text edits, the ability to track what you have done is fantastic. You can turn around an updated document showing the edits inline very quickly.

If this describes your work environment then this feature alone could be worth the cost of the upgrade.

Conditional content

For anyone who has had to suffer with conditional content in the past this version has a major modification. If all you do is use conditional content in a very traditional sense, you may not see the difference. However, if you overlap any conditions, prepare for a nice surprise: the Expression.

Overlapping conditions now support AND, OR, and NOT features. This means that you can specify that content be conditional for multiple products, audiences, or platforms and overlap them. Then, when needed, you can specify a display that includes specific mixes of conditions. In the past, all conditional content was treated as OR content.

That meant that any content that was conditionalized would show up regardless of an overlap. In the new version you can specify the combinations you need to manage and display or hide content as you want. If you want to show content that is conditional in Help AND for Windows, you can build it.

Overlapping conditions are no longer magenta either. Custom colors are applied dynamically when more than one condition is applied.

Now the really bad news: the names used in the expression editor are horrible. If you have content that has a variety of combinations and you need to develop a clearly named way to show and hide it, be ready for disappointment. If you have Mac-specific types of PDF output as well as Windows and UNIX versions of materials, the expressions and the names may appear as seen below. Not pretty. With no way to create a friendly name you can expect frustration early on as you try to construct the right combinations.

For clients using overlapping conditional content this is worth the upgrade on its own.

Work with Structure

Structure Tools menu

If you work with structured content in FrameMaker (as more and more clients do), this is a nice touch. Most of the options that used to branch off the File menu get their own home.

Some of the objects are still a bit scattered. For example, the View menu is still home to the Element Boundaries and Attribute Display options. The Special menu still has Remove Structure from Flow. There are a few other new additions to the Special menu that relate to structure as well. However, this is a start in the consolidation of some of the more common elements (some pun intended).

Another nice upgrade, but not a crucial one.

XML applications

Even if you don’t use DITA but plan to start with XML, you can consider version 8.0 to be a step up. There are a lot more applications and there is far better support for structure in general.

Add to this the growing need for XML support in software tools in general and one can see that Adobe is taking the product more seriously. I really hope that this stops the rumours of a death in the family at Adobe.

Import comments

In the past, any comments in XML files were lost on import. Now, instead of dropping comments, markers are created to support the use of comments in the XML source file. The markers can then be managed in the same way as any other marker type in FrameMaker.

For people who import XML files that contain comments that others have generated this is a nice feature to have.

Variables and structure

Again, I say “Finally”! In the past, the use of variables and FrameMaker import or export of XML did not work well together.  With the new release it is painless to export content with variables and automatically have entities created.

This resolves the long-standing problem of user variables being flattened to plain text on export to XML and is a major step forward in resolving what should have been a basic patch in the past.

It’s nice to see that aside from major features that have been added there are also small things. Adobe seems to be paying attention to requests from users and looking at the details of the application, not just the features that build marketing hype.

Filter by attribute

Conditions in structured content had always been horrible to work with. FrameMaker added processing instructions to files on export to handle conditional content. This meant quite a bit of work in other tools. It also increased the “look, FrameMaker isn’t doing real XML” complaints from users of other tools, as the condition comments only worked in FrameMaker!

The new release provides a feature that lets you filter content by attribute and value in a manner similar to conditional content. If an element has attributes with specific values, FrameMaker can use those attributes and values to filter content.

For example, an element with an attribute named Platform with a value set to Windows is filtered and hidden when the Macintosh version of a document is produced. Then, when the Windows version of the document is produced, the filter would display only elements with their Platform attribute value set to Windows.

Unlike the conditional text utility to manage expressions, the attribute filters can have a friendly name assigned to them as well. Adobe needs to add that to the expressions used in unstructured conditional content to make it even better.

With DITA support and the attribute-based filtering there is a dramatically improved way to manage content for multiple products, platforms, and audiences at any given time.

This feature alone is likely worth the cost of an upgrade if you work with structured content and need conditional content.

DITA menu (and DITA support)

This one gets its own section. If you plan to use DITA, then get the upgrade. For DITA support alone, the software is worth the upgrade.

For anyone who works with DITA and is either using FrameMaker or plans to, version 8.0 is a far more solid launch point than 7.x was or likely will be, even with plug-in tools from Adobe and third parties.

This release supports DITA xref elements, works well with layout, and lets you open and edit maps including relationship tables. You can easily create topics and export them to XML. These files can be successfully opened with other tools and even transformed using the DITA Open Toolkit.

Conref elements work well for reuse of materials in your documents. Consider this a huge step up from the use of text insets. A conref allows you to reference content created in another document, even if it’s only a specific paragraph, table, or image, or even the phrase used to describe a user interface control.

DITA support is well worth the upgrade if you plan to work with DITA. For anyone considering DITA, it is safe to say that you will spend a lot of time and money to customize an older version, so it would make sense to switch to version 8.0.

Worth the cost?

To be seen. There are specific features that make it worth the upgrade cost on their own. If these are features you will use, then go for it.  Without a compelling reason to upgrade you may want to wait to see what your evolving publishing needs are and make the call down the road.

Personally, I have upgraded and use it now for about half of what I do for clients. A lot of the work I do involves DITA or structure and that makes an upgrade an easy choice for me. For client use I recommend evaluating the features, downloading a copy to test (you can run both FrameMaker X.x and 8.0 on the same machine), and deciding whether the new functions make enough difference to justify the cost.

If nothing else, the new Technical Communications Suite from Adobe should help make the decision to work with FrameMaker 8.0. This is due to the tighter integration between RoboHelp, Captivate, and Acrobat when working with FrameMaker.

Final words

By releasing a new version of the software and announcing a new suite integrating FrameMaker with other key products, Adobe seems ready to take the technical communications field seriously.

About the author

Bernard Aschwanden, Director of Technology and Publishing Architecture with Bright Path Solutions (www.brightpathsolutions.com), is a recognized publishing technologies expert. He is an Adobe Certified Expert, an XMetaL Certified Trainer, a Certified Technical Trainer, and the author of numerous articles on XML-based publishing and single-sourcing. He is also co-author of the book Advanced FrameMaker.

He is a senior member of the Society for Technical Communication, the President of the Toronto Chapter STC, and Past President of the Computer Trainers Network. Bernard has helped hundreds of companies implement successful unstructured and DITA/XML-based publishing solutions.

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