Adobe FrameMaker 5.5.6
If yours is a corporate publishing house with large volumes of publications going out every year via print as well as electronic media, and you are not looking for too many tabloid and advertising gimmicks in your page layout, Adobe FrameMaker is the solution for you. Technical publications and manuals are mostly created in a collaborative environment where several authors work at different workstations to bring out a single volume of work at the end of the day; and that is precisely what FrameMaker is designed for.
Files are freely exchangeable among Windows, Mac and Unix operating systems, though you need to purchase the application appropriate for your system. Many import filters function across platforms. Adobe specifies meagre resources: a 486 CPU with 16 MB RAM (32 MB recommended). Even under typical setup, it makes a demand of nearly 70 MB on the hard disk. With too many filters to load, the program starts up slowly even with a considerably higher configuration than recommended.
Adobe lays much emphasis on speed and productivity with FrameMaker, but it doesn't always translate into reality. The indexed Help file does not follow Window's way of querying with a key word and finding a display of text to match the key word. Instead, reading FrameMaker's help file is as laborious as looking through the yellow pages for a particular product.
Function over form: The FrameMaker interface is clean and uncluttered, with a large screen for the actual page. A small display bar tucked away in the top right corner has icons for an Equation bar, Tool bar, Font catalogue and Paragraph catalogue. An odd assortment, you might say, but it is functional. Productivity, rather than too many features, is obviously the aim. The CD comes with over 30 predefined templates. You can download over 150 more (many of them quite sophisticated and truly professional) from the Web site. Multiple master pages are available. You can even have different portrait- and landscape-oriented pages in the same document. The maximum page size possible is not mentioned anywhere online, but we successfully achieved 297x210 cm (100 times A4 size), though FrameMaker alerts you about the pitfalls in making changes midstream. There is just a single undo level, but even this is not available for many operations. The document comparison feature, unique to FrameMaker, is a real plus point. You
can retain an older version as well as the revised version within the same document, and use either at will. You can import text from quite a few formats, including Word 97. PDF documents can be brought in either as a whole document or in selected pages, with the hyperlinks intact.
You can also import formats (paragraph, character, table, page-you name it), but typesetting features within the application are severely limited. However, you can select a line of text and condense, expand or proportionately resize it by clicking and dragging, a feat usually accomplished in CorelDRAW. Predefined paragraph and character styles are available; you can create more and store them under the respective 'catalogue'.
The catalogue of styles, which is portable across documents, lends consistency. A fairly large multilingual spelling and hyphenation dictionary is the only copyediting tool available.
Supports Web publishing: FrameMaker's Book feature is its trump card. There is nothing that you cannot do: indexing, TOC, creating appendices, lists, numbered chapters, crossheads, paragraphs, picture captions, whatever. Page numbers can be formatted differently for different types of chapters: for example, you might use Roman numerals for main body, alphabetic numbering for appendices and a combination of both for index pages. The feature includes a Book file, which contains the names of all chapters as well as the contents of generated files: Index, TOC etc.
A whole book can be directly exported in the PDF format. Selected or all the pages of a book can be saved as HTML or XML for publishing on the Web. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is an enhanced version of HTML with a far more powerful search feature. Also, a long document can be converted into multiple Web pages. A dialog box facilitates quick cleanup of the Web page after conversion. Index is converted to hyperlinks.
Graphics in anchored text frames are automatically converted to GIF format and generally retain their relative position. FrameMaker recommends that the built-in templates are best for HTML conversion.
FrameMaker's ability to create graphic objects locally is rather basic. We found a number of graphic file formats listed for import but, strangely, PSD and .AI were not among them. You can insert many objects, including maps, charts and spreadsheets.
There is a fairly sophisticated Table editor and Equation editor. Text runaround styles are primitive, and can be done only on one side of the imported image. You don't have to go through the print-to-file route to create PDF documents, but creating print files for service bureau is easy enough.
Layers of colours can be overprinted, or you can use the knockout feature, with trapping applied. The Macintosh version has more trap and print features. A special menu that helps you to reach out to a service bureau with a set of open files for commercial printing is missing. Evidently, Adobe has assigned primary importance to electronic and print-on-demand publishing-Web, CD-ROM and PDF-and commercial publishing plays second fiddle under FrameMaker's scheme of things.
Adobe's claims notwithstanding, migration to FrameMaker from another page layout application is not easy. There is very little in common with other popular applications in terms of interface, keyboard shortcuts, toolbar structure or menu bar layout.
Nonetheless, you will find that the application's virtue lies in productivity and speed, once you master the unique techniques. Adobe is in a position to quote a number of corporate giants to prove this point.