About FrameMaker Interchange Format
Adobe FrameMaker is a desktop publishing application that
is popular for large documents. It is produced by Adobe Systems.
Although (or perhaps because) FrameMaker has evolved slowly in recent years,
it maintains a strong following among professional technical writers.
As an all-in-one package optimized for technical writers, FrameMaker remains
unrivalled. But for deployment in high-end technical publication departments, native
XML authoring systems are starting to replace it.
FrameMaker has more or less kept up with the times
in supporting new standards: XML, Unicode and WebDAV are examples. But
at heart it is a proprietary single-desktop-oriented system based
on a binary file format. Configuring it for XML is a difficult,
expensive process and some XML features do not nicely integrate with built-in
FrameMaker features. While problems exist in FrameMaker's XML incarnation,
FrameMaker supports authoring in an XML-based workflow considerably better than
Microsoft Word.
FrameMaker became an Adobe product in 1995 when Adobe
purchased Frame Technology Corp. Adobe added SGML support, which eventually morphed into
today's XML support. In April of 2004, Adobe ceased support of FrameMaker for
the Macintosh. This reinvigorated widespread rumours that product development and support for
FrameMaker are being wound down. Adobe strenuously denies this.
History:
A mathematician alumnus from the University of Cambridge named
Charles "Nick" Corfield decided to write a WYSIWYG document editor
on a Sun 2 workstation because such software did not exist.
The prototype version of FrameMaker caught the eyes of salesmen
at the fledgling Sun Microsystems, which lacked commercial applications to showcase
the graphics capabilities of their workstations. They got permission from Corfield
to use the prototype as a demoware for their computers, and hence, the primitive
FrameMaker received plenty of exposure in the Unix workstation arena.
Steve Kirsch saw the demo and realized the potential of the product.
Kirsch used the money he earned from Mouse Systems to fund a startup company,
Frame Technology Corp., to commercialize the software.
Originally written for SunOS (a variant of UNIX)
on Sun 3 machines, FrameMaker was a popular technical writing tool, and the
company was profitable early on. Due to the flourishing desktop publishing market
on the Apple Macintosh, the software was ported to the Mac as the second
platform.
In the early 1990s, a wave of UNIX workstation vendors-S
only, Motorola, Data General, MIPS and Apollo-provided funding to Frame Technology for
an OEM version for their platforms.
At the height of its success, FrameMaker ran on more than
thirteen UNIX platforms, including NeXT Computer's NeXTSTEP and IBM's AIX operating systems.
The NeXT and AIX version of FrameMaker used Display PostScript technology while all
other UNIX versions used the X Window System-Motif windowing environment.
Sun Microsystems and AT&T tried to push the OpenLook GUI
standards to win over Motif, so Sun contracted Frame Technology to implement
a version of FrameMaker on their PostScript-based NeWS windowing system. The
NeWS version of FrameMaker was successfully released to NSA, which was among the
first few customers adopting the OpenLook standards.
At this point, FrameMaker was an extraordinarily good product for
its day, enabling authors to produce highly structured documents with relative
ease, but also giving users a great deal of typographical control
in a reasonably intuitive and totally WYSIWYG way. The output documents could
be of very high typographical quality.
Frame Technology later ported FrameMaker to Microsoft Windows,
but the company lost direction soon after its release. Up to this point,
FrameMaker had been targeting a professional market for highly technical publications,
such as the maintenance manuals for the Boeing 777 project, and licensed each copy
for $2,500. But the Windows version brought the product to the $500 price range, which
cannibalized its own non-Windows customer base.
The company's attempt to sell sophisticated technical publishing
software to the home DTP market was a disaster. A tool designed for
a 1000-page manual was too cumbersome and difficult for an average home user
to type a one-page letter (and despite some initially enthusiastic users,
FrameMaker never really took off in the academic market, because of the company's
unwillingness to incorporate various functions e.g. proper support
to footnotes and endnotes, or to improve the equation editor).
Sales plummeted and brought the company to the verge
of bankruptcy. After several rounds of layoffs, the company was stripped
to the bare bones.
Adobe Systems acquired the product and returned the focus to the
professional market. Today, Adobe FrameMaker is still a widely used publication
tool for technical writers, although no version has been released for the
Mac OS X operating system, further limiting use of the product.
There were several major competitors in the technical publishing market
such as Interleaf etc. None of those products survived the influence
of Microsoft Word except FrameMaker. Recent FrameMaker versions (5.x through 7.x, from
mid-1995 to 2006) have not updated major parts of the program (including its
general user interface, table editing, illustration editing), concentrating instead
on bug fixes and the integration of XML-oriented features (previously part
of the FrameMaker+SGML premium product). Interestingly, FrameMaker did not feature
multiple undo until version 7.2 (its 2006 release).
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Links:
Adobe Framemaker Official
Page
FrameMaker for MacOS X Petition
FrameMaker for Mac OS X Mailing
List
FreeFramers Wiki
Google: Newsgroup Adobe Framemaker
History of FrameMaker
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Florence Tesmoingt,
