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FrameMaker 8.0 Product Review (continued)

What's in this article:

• Interface upgrades
• Working with other file types
• Work smarter with content
• Work with structure
• DITA support
• Worth the cost?

DITA support

This one gets its own section. If you plan to use DITA, then get the upgrade. For DITA support alone the software is worth the upgrade.

For anyone who works with DITA and is either using FrameMaker or plans to, version 8.0 is a far more solid launch point than 7.x was or likely will be, even with plug-in tools from Adobe and third parties.

This release supports DITA xref elements, works well with layout and allows you to open and edit maps including relationship tables. You can easily create topics and export them to XML. These files can be successfully opened with other tools and even transformed using the DITA Open Toolkit.

Conref elements work well for reuse of materials in your documents. Consider this to be a huge step up from the use of text insets. A conref allows you to reference content created in another document, even if it’s only a specific paragraph, table, image or even the phrase used to describe a user interface control.

DITA support is well worth the upgrade if you plan on working with DITA. For the effort to get 7.x to work with DITA you should be far better off to get version 8.0.

For anyone considering DITA, it is safe to say that you will spend a lot of time and money to customize an older version, so it would make sense to switch to version 8.0.

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