Adobe FrameMaker
FrameMaker is a professional authoring tool for managing and print -based presentation of technical documents, which was originally developed and marketed by Frame Technologies and was acquired by Adobe Systems mid-1990s. It was originally developed for the operating system SunOS from Sun and later ported to the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows platforms, the Mac port is no longer being developed since 2004.
Properties
The strengths of the program lie in the field of technical documentation, which may include, without further many thousands of pages. In mathematical and scientific environment FrameMaker is a viable alternative to LaTeX because of its practicable formula rate implementation. Frame also offers good support for the creation of SGML and XML documents.
FrameMaker is a program for creating and editing complex documents. The program can be used for example for loose-leaf collections and create for the list of changed (exchange) pages. Also, Adobe FrameMaker can create without loss of information PDF documents.
The properties of FrameMaker can be extended ( C ) by programming your own plug- ins with the FrameMaker Developer's Kit. Similar capability is provided FrameScript ( in Germany: ElmScript ), a scripting language for FrameMaker; many scripts are freely available in the relevant websites or lists.
The program worked until version 7.2 internally with the Macintosh Roman character set; FrameMaker therefore had difficulties with various Eastern European characters and non-Latin fonts. The font engine FrameMaker is Unicode-enabled since version 8.0, enabling both texts in all EU languages and the publication eg Indian texts if appropriate fonts are installed. Furthermore, does not support the publication of texts in languages which are placed from right to left ( Arabic, Hebrew ).
Program development
During his astrophysics studies at Columbia University Charles " Nick" Corfield began to write a WYSIWYG editor on a Sun -2 workstation. The suggestion came from his neighbors Ben Meiry who recognized a market for a professional desktop publishing program.
The only time was Interleaf desktop publishing program that ran on Sun workstations, however, was subject to a number of limitations. While Meiry took care of the technology and compounds, Corfield developed a program with powerful algorithms and an elegant design. After a few months, a stable prototype of FrameMaker was born. A salesman from Sun Microsystems liked the program and Corfield allowed him to use FrameMaker graphics demo on Sun computers.
Steve Kirsch recognized the potential of FrameMaker and founded Corfield (and others) the company Frame Technology Corp.. , To make the program ready for the market. FrameMaker was a popular writing program for technical documentation and soon brought a money. Originally written ( a Unix variant) for SunOS, FrameMaker has been ported to the Apple Macintosh, which sold very well at the time.
In the early 90s several manufacturers of UNIX workstations (Sony, Motorola, Data General, MIPS, and Apollo) funded the porting of their appliances. At the peak of success FrameMaker was used on over 13 UNIX platforms, including IBM's AIX and NeXTStep. At this time, FrameMaker an exceptionally good program authors to produce high quality documents at the same time simplified and enabled a good typography in intuitive way. The documents produced had high print quality.
Frame Technology ported FrameMaker later on Microsoft Windows and lost the market overview. Target customers were up to this time professional writers extensive and highly technical embossed publications (eg a maintenance manual for the Boeing 777 ); Accordingly, cost FrameMaker U.S. $ 2,500 per license. The Windows version, however, was offered for $ 500, what the program is for the private made affordable, but so far quite the unified customer profile was destroyed. The complex FrameMaker was much to be learned intensively for home. The absence of the expected sales brought the company to the brink of ruin.
FrameMaker was eventually bought out by Adobe Systems and targeted sales back to the professional clientele. The development of the software was, however, very slow: after the introduction of Mac OS X Adobe neglected the Macintosh platform, and gave them finally at 16 April 2004 was focused on. The current version supports Microsoft Windows and Solaris.
In the area of technical documentation FrameMaker had some competing products, but all disappeared with the growing popularity of Microsoft Word from the market. FrameMaker could exist on the market due to its extraordinary benefits, although the main features have remained unchanged since 1995 and the development was limited to bug fixes and implementation of XML - oriented functions.
Versions
- 2012: FrameMaker 11.0
- 2014: FrameMaker 12.0