Group Wellesley Wire

Leximation, Inc. has announced that the DITA-FMx 1.0 plug-in has been released. This plug-in improves upon the DITA support provided with FrameMaker 8, including increased coverage of the DITA specification and improvements to the authoring experience.

The DITA specification presents rather steep challenges to tool implementers. The Leximation plug-in further enhances FrameMaker as an option for DITA authoring and publishing. Given the complexities of XSL-FO for generating PDF output, and the recent uncertainty regarding PDF support in the DITA Open Toolkit, FrameMaker should be especially appealing for organizations that need high-quality PDF output from DITA.

The DITA-FMx 1.0 plug-in supports DITA version 1.0. Support for DITA 1.1 is forthcoming, and will be provided at no charge to those who purchase DITA-FMx 1.0.

Some users of FrameMaker on Windows XP and Vista (including myself) have been vexed by FrameMaker crashes while generating PDF files, and generated PDF files with missing text (not good). The problem appeared to be random, affecting some systems but not others, and some documents but not others.

The workaround (until now) has been to delete the file “C:\WINDOWS\system32\FNTCACHE.DAT” and reboot. Many FrameMaker users would delete this file regularly, and some did so automatically through a shutdown script.

Mahesh Gupta, Product Manager for Adobe FrameMaker, reports that Microsoft has patched the underlying font management issues that have caused these problems. His post in the Adobe Technical Communication blog provides details of the Microsoft patch.

And there was much rejoicing among FrameMaker users!

I enjoy a journey to Europe once or twice a year, and this year is no exception. Over the next two weeks, I will be participating in several events:

• The annual tekom/TCWorld conference takes place again in the beautiful German city of Wiesbaden, November 7-9. I will be presenting two sessions, Using DITA with FrameMaker, and Developing DITA Maps. This is my third visit to this conference.
• I am privileged to visit Manchester England on November 10 and 11. I will be supporting the STC UK chapter wth a two-day workshop on DITA, DITA authoring tools, and the DITA Open Toolkit. Participants will have the opportunity to use two popular DITA authoring tools (FrameMaker and XMetaL), use the DITA Open Toolkit for publishing, and develop DITA specializations. Participants will receive a free copy of Mif2Go, a wonderful multi-purpose conversion utility for FrameMaker documents. Mif2Go has recently added unstructured FrameMaker-to-DITA conversion support.
• November 13 - 14 brings me to Brussels for the annual DITA Europe conference. This is my first time at DITA Europe, but JoAnn Hackos always runs outstanding events. I will present on DITA Rapid Prototyping with the IBM Task Modeler. This is one of my favorite techniques with one of my favorite (and under-publicized) tools, the IBM Task Modeler.

Registration for each event is still open. If you are in Europe and are looking for a relatively low-cost training experience, I especially recommend the STC UK DITA workshop. As usual, I look forward to seeing many of my “virtual” colleagues in person at these events.

I was originally skeptical of the Adobe/Macromedia merger. I saw another case of a larger company buying a smaller company purely to stifle competition, usually by killing those pesky competing products. Promises of greater synergy that usually pepper the press releases associated with these mergers are usually unfounded.

Not quite two years later, I’m a convert. I just received my copy of the Adobe Creative Suite 3, Master Collection. This package includes the key Adobe and former Macromedia products for image production, vector-based illustration, layout-intensive print production, Web content development, Flash authoring and production, as well as video and audio editing. Twelve major products in all, plus some ancillary goodies.

It’s notable that Adobe has chosen to maintain and improve Dreamweaver over GoLive. To call Dreamweaver a Web authoring tool is a massive understatement. Perhaps Web development environment is more appropriate. Dreamweaver was always a step or two (or three) ahead of GoLive in feature set and capabilities, and Adobe made the right choice here.

It’s all here — in on package, one installer. I suspect it’s not lost on the Adobe bean-counters that the cost of this suite is comparable to the cost of a computer with the required hardware to run it. Separately, however, the cost of these products would be several times that of the suite price.

I see similar synergy in Adobe’s technical communication products. FrameMaker for conventional and XML-based authoring and publishing, RoboHelp for online help development, Captivate for animations, tutorials, and simulations, and Acrobat for review, collaboration, approval, and distribution. Adobe can now cover a wide range of capabilities for technical communicators. And Adobe product managers are speaking of increasing cross-product integration. It will be interesting to see where this goes.

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.

At last week’s STC Summit, Adobe broke with long-standing corporate policy and demonstrated not-yet-released versions of FrameMaker, RoboHelp, and Captivate. Adobe has asked that the following corporate legalese appear in any mention of the STC Summit demonstrations:

The features presented during the Technology Sneak peak contain proof of concept features and features in the development pipeline. They are not final for the next release however we want to take this opportunity to show the general direction of where we are taking the products.

Unreleased FrameMaker features that Adobe demonstrated at the STC Summit include:

• Unicode
• DITA support
• Flash and 3D support
• Vista Support and docx import
• Track Text Edits
• Attribute based filtering /output
• Import of XML and CSS files
• Conditional Text Enhancements

We are pleased by Adobe’s new corporate openness, especially with respect to its tools for technical communicators. We have been hearing the “FrameMaker is dead” rumors for far too long, and hope that Adobe’s continuing presence at events like the STC Summit helps to put these rumors to rest.

At the STC Summit in Minneapolis last week, I was disappointed that MadCap Software was not yet demonstrating its print-centric product called Blaze (their “FrameMaker alternative”). New development of help authoring tools has been somewhere between slow and non-existent for much of this decade. MadCap Flare has helped to break this stagnation by motivating other help authoring tool vendors to increase their level of innovation. We look forward to seeing the effect of similar pressure on the Adobe FrameMaker development team. Competition is good.