Adobe FrameMaker 7

With Adobe's long-standing commitment to PageMaker and its born-again enthusiasm for InDesign, it's easy to forget that the company actually has three DTP apps in its stable. The third option, FrameMaker, is a very different beast. Whereas PageMaker and InDesign both emphasise intensive, hands-on, print-oriented design, FrameMaker focuses on longer documents, near automatic layout and the ability to repurpose to different output media. If your multiplatform organisation is producing multiple versions of a multichapter document for output to multiple different media, FrameMaker is the clear choice.

The trouble is that, recently, it's not just the wider public that seems to have forgotten FrameMaker - Adobe has too. Almost as soon as it bought in FrameMaker from its original developer, Adobe decided to concentrate its efforts on creating InDesign from scratch. The result has been lean pickings for FrameMaker. The first Adobe release was built on the bundling of Distiller, while the second was built on the bundling of WebWorks Publisher. Both opened up important new output options in PDF and HTML, but hardly signalled a major commitment from Adobe. The discontent of users was such that Adobe was forced into the unprecedented move of denying that it had laid off its FrameMaker development team. So has Adobe come up with enough in this release to prove its commitment?

By far the biggest disappointment in the last release was the lack of built-in XML (eXtensible Markup Language) support. According to most industry pundits, XML is the future of computing generally and of repurposing and institutional publishing in particular. XML is built on the same principle of tagging content that underpins HTML, but takes the idea further by offering both more extensibility and also more programmatic rigour. In many ways, the format embodies the principles of flexibility through tight control that FrameMaker represents, and it's hard to think of a more natural XML publisher.

In fact, FrameMaker has offered XML-style control for years in the form of FrameMaker+SGML. This is a high-end - and previously astronomically expensive - version of FrameMaker fine-tuned for authors producing work based on SGML (Standard Generalized Markup Language). SGML is the direct forerunner of XML, as it was the original mark-up language for writing other mark-up languages. XML is effectively a cut-down and simplified variant of SGML. Now Adobe has opened up this existing high-end power by bundling the +SGML features directly into the main FrameMaker program as a new 'structured' mode (you can swap back to the vanilla 'unstructured' mode under Preferences).

tagged approach

What makes FrameMaker's new structured mode different is that it takes the existing emphasis on tight control through tagging and runs with it. Nine-tenths of the work comes before you even begin a new document in the setup of what XML calls a DTD (Document Type Definition) and what FrameMaker calls an EDD (Element Definition Document). This not only sets out what tags are available, but which tags are available where and how. A element, for example, might demand the inclusion of single , and elements and no others. By pinning everything down, FrameMaker can produce 'well-formed' and 'valid' XML - exact code that any other XML-based application such as a browser will be able to process reliably.