FrameMaker 8.0 Product Review (continued)
What's in this article:
Adobe has released FrameMaker 8.0 and a whole technical communication suite to go with it. According to their website it’s “a flexible, user-friendly, enterprise-class authoring and publishing solution for technical communicators. It combines word processing and XML-based structured authoring with template-based publishing and powerful single-sourcing support to help you create polished technical documentation and books in multiple languages.”
That’s a lot of marketing in a few quick sentences. People want to know what’s actually new, what’s good and what’s not, and what’s worth paying the upgrade price for? In this article, I dive in a bit deeper to discuss features and my personal take on them.
Interface upgrades
Tab bar
 The FrameMaker interface has a new look to it. Part of the new look includes a tab bar across the top when more than one file is open. The tabs display the names of open documents. It’s a nice feature and easy to use.
While this is a nice feature, it’s not a must have for upgrading. I do like being able to see the names of several files, but I’d love to see more power added to the tab bar. It’s a fast way to navigate between a few open files, but if you open more than a dozen files it’s bulky and you end up tabbing around using traditional shortcuts.
Should Adobe be reading this, I’d love to be able to drag and drop the order of the tabs, right click in one and have more options and generally have more than a horizontal list of open files. However, for a user who opens 3, 4 or even about a dozen files, it’s a nice quick way to see what is open and navigate between documents.
Finally, if you don’t like the tab bar it’s easy to turn it off from the View menu.
On its own this likely isn’t enough to justify the cost of the upgrade, but combined with additional features it sure is a nice thing to see.
Vista
support
If you are one of the dozens of
Vista
users worldwide (okay, there may be hundreds by now) then this is great. If you are not on
Vista
, it’s not a problem. FrameMaker runs on Windows 2000 and on Windows XP. You can also run on Solaris UNIX. As with the past few versions though, no Macintosh support.
Vista
support will become more important as Microsoft phases out more and more of the Windows XP software. Manufacturers of PCs will drop the option of a Windows XP install on a new system in the next year or so as well, so the
Vista
support is a forward-looking move by Adobe.
Adobe is doing some longer term planning. This should help retain and grow the user base as companies upgrade their OS.
Save directly to PDF or XML
 The File menu is updated to support File > Save and File > Save As just like in the past. However, you also can choose Save As > PDF or Save As > XML if you wish. The Save Document dialogue displays and automatically selects the appropriate file type.
As far as a new feature, I think that it is nice, but not crucial. As with other minor changes to the interface, this is a nice feature to have as a bonus to the full features of the new product.
In my opinion it is not worth the upgrade for this one alone.
Font menu improvements
This I like. Quite a bit more than I thought I would early on. Of course, I do a lot of font work, so it may be of greater value to me than to you.
When you select any font related command (Format > Font or the Font option in the Paragraph or the Character Designer) the real font appearance is displayed when you roll over a font name. No more guessing what the font looks like.
Nice to have when you do not know with certainty what the differences are between, say, Minion and Myriad and you want to quickly identify the serif family. However, if you know your fonts well and do not use a huge variety this may be a minor change for you. To remember each distinct font and its appearance is a lot of work for me. Now I don’t have to.
This is worth the upgrade for me since I work with multiple client files that use many fonts.
Dialog redesign
The majority of the dialog boxes in FrameMaker retain the same functions, but have been modified to add usability that I’ve wanted for a long time. While not perfect, this is a pretty nice change.
Marker dialogs in FrameMaker 7.x and 8.0:
 
Variable dialogs in FrameMaker 7.x and 8.0:
 
As with most of the interface design changes, I don’t think this is worth the upgrade cost on its own, but it is nice to get when I buy the product for other reasons.
Menu changes
While the majority of the menu changes have been for the better, there are a few that you have to get used to. Stuff that really vexes me includes the decision to change existing keyboard shortcuts.
For example, when Adobe added the tab bar the menu command of Alt, v, b (which would toggle the View for Borders) got hijacked. For the tab bar! Why would they do this? For years I’ve used the quick key combo on my PC to toggle borders on and off. Now I have to use Alt, v, o to activate the same function. That’s a lot of muscle memory gone.
While not a planet ending change, it’s really frustrating to get to know a tool only to have some simple things yanked out from under you. Why this change? Why add a new function and then take over an existing menu command? Would it not have been easier to simply come up with something else for the tab bar?
In the same way, the new Stucture menu creates some issues. If you were used to using the letter u to access Utilities in the old system, get used to the letter l instead. That’s right. The lowercase L is used for utilities. The letter U it seems has moved on to Set Structured Application.
It’s a headache, but not enough to switch me back to 7.x FrameMaker use. Instead, I’ll just have to learn my shortcuts again. Sigh.
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