Group Wellesley Wire

On July 23, Adobe announced the release of FrameMaker 8, which began to ship a week later. New features of FrameMaker 8 include Unicode, DITA, ability to embed “active” Flash and 3D objects in PDF, text-edit tracking, improved conditional text support, and attribute-based filtering. A review is available here.

In a first for Adobe, the company had provided some prior information about this release of FrameMaker. In the Adobe Technical Communication FAQ (PDF version), Adobe stated that “our [Adobe’s] current assumption is that the next major release of FrameMaker will be in the first half of 2007.” Given the complexity of the FrameMaker application and of software development in general, missing this target by a month isn’t too shabby.

Adobe posted the Technical Communication FAQ in July 2006. This action was very highly unusual — Adobe usually holds plans for new product features and release plans in extreme secrecy. However, at that time Adobe was facing market skepticism over its revival of Robohelp, as well as lingering rumors about the future of FrameMaker. The Adobe FAQ, and Adobe’s execution of the plans it outlined, have helped to assuage this skepticism.

Technical communication tools development has been relatively stagnant for the past several years. These are exciting times for technical communicators, with renewed activity (and competition) in the tools development space. Let’s hope that Adobe (and other tools vendors) will continue to share some of their future plans with us.

If you enjoyed the film Helvetica (or at least find it interesting that somebody produced a documentary about a typeface), you may enjoy The Road to Clarity in the Sunday, August 12 New York Times Magazine section (registration required). The article tells the story of the development and current deployment of Clearview, a new typeface designed specifically for highway signage.

Central to the story is how typographic details like counter shapes (the closed spaces inside lower-case a, e, and o) and x-height (the height of the lower-case x) can have a profound effect on readability under real-world highway conditions (e.g., distance and darkness).

In user tests, signs that were legible at 700 feet in the current standard signage typeface, Highway Gothic, were readable in Clearview at 900-1,000 feet.

Thus far, 20 U.S. states have adopted Clearview, and are deploying the new typeface as current signs are replaced.