Product Reviews

Very few products achieve timeless greatness. But when it comes to sheer capability, FrameMaker surely qualifies for that hall of fame. A few years ago, it looked as if Adobe's acquisition of FrameMaker might result in a further reduction in the choice of publishing products. Although successful in its niche across Mac, Windows and Unix platforms, FrameMaker was hardly setting the publishing world alight, and needed sound financial backing, steady investment, and better integration.

Adobe has provided all these, and the latest releases, although perhaps exaggerated in significance by a whole increment in version number, merit the attention of anyone working with long and/or technical documents, particularly if they have to publish across multiple media. The major improvements are in the handling of books (collections of individual Frame documents, one of its early features) and the production of Web and electronic media output.

Previous versions have supported, if not encouraged, the structure of long documents into chapters within books, but there have been limitations. Books are now first class objects within FrameMaker's environment - you can drag-and-drop chapters onto a Book window, re-order them directly, and include non-FrameMaker documents (such as PDF files) within a book. The old and thorny issue of page numbering across chapters of a book has been addressed in typical FrameMaker style, by providing ready support for almost every numbering system you could wish for. One particularly nice touch is the ability to edit, spell-check, and read through all the chapters of a book without having to open chapters separately.

HTML output in FrameMaker has previously been supported by fairly primitive linked third-party tools. Adobe still hasn't attempted to incorporate sophisticated Web or Acrobat publishing within FrameMaker itself, but bundles WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition and Acrobat Distiller (4.05) with it. While the end result is very powerful and flexible, sometimes the seams gape a little, and Adobe could surely be a bit more generous in what it bundles. For instance, although Acrobat Distiller and Reader come free, you have to buy Acrobat itself separately,

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as well as the full version of Adobe Type Manager. It also grates that Windows and Unix users have the option of upgrading WebWorks, but there's no professional version for the Mac yet.

That said, WebWorks opens up nicely integrated publications of FrameMaker documents in HTML, DHTML (HTML plus Cascading Style Sheets) and XML formats, and the resulting projects in turn fit in well with Adobe's GoLive. If you need the Acrobat PDF route, then FrameMaker will link with Distiller to churn out excellently structured PDF files. These are a far cry from the old print-to-disk-and-Distill road, as they now retain hypertext links and document structure, saving all the effort of building those back into the PDF. Once again, the seams can gape slightly here, in that very large and complex documents may cause spurious or real errors, and you may end up having to drop a .tps file onto Distiller to coax it to completion.

FrameMaker can also now incorporate PDF into its own documents. You can, of course, place a whole PDF document into a book, or bring it in as non-editable content for your own pages. Irritatingly, by default, FrameMaker imports PDF pages by converting them into Level 1 EPS files, which will drop out most colour in them, owing to Level 1's primitive support for colour. The ReadMe file offers a ResEdit hack to work round this, indicating that perhaps this will change in a future minor revision.

Regular FrameMaker still has all those wonderful features which have ensured its niche: the most sophisticated tables in the business, with easy incorporation of graphics, for example; an unrivalled ability to typeset mathematical material and equations which makes you wonder whether TeX has any further use; plus excellent but unobtrusive control over typography, colour, and the like.

The substantially more expensive SGML version is intended for those who need to embed its tags to imbue structure into the content of their documents. It provides all the features of the regular version, together with excellent support for SGML's tags. Performance of markup handling has improved, and many irritating minor bugs have been fixed. FrameMaker + SGML also provides more sophisticated support for XML output.

There are, however, some missed opportunities. Given Adobe's flagship InDesign and PageMaker products, it would have been nice to have been able to import (at least) documents from those applications (although Publish and Subscribe is possible). Neither is import of XML supported yet, even in FrameMaker + SGML.

FrameMaker has long since achieved greatness. These new releases merely ensure that it continues to take all terrains and media in its stride. You might prefer something more popular, but when the going gets tough, the tough turn to FrameMaker.