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FrameMaker 8.0 Product Review (continued)What's in this article:
Work with StructureStructure Tools menuI Some of the objects are still a bit scattered. For example, the View menu still is home to the Element Boundaries and Attribute Display options. The Special menu still has Remove Structure from Flow. There are a few other new additions to the Special menu that relate to structure as well. However, this is a start in the consolidation of some of the more common elements (some pun intended). Another nice upgrade, but not a crucial one. XML applicationsEven if you don’t use DITA but plan to start with XML you can consider version 8.0 to be a step up. There are a lot more applications to start with and there is far better support for structure in general. Add to this the growing need for XML support in software tools in general and one can see that Adobe is taking the product more seriously. I really hope that this stops the rumours of a death in the family at Adobe. Import commentsIn the past, any comments in XML files were lost on import. Instead of dropping comments, markers are created to support the use of comments in the XML source file. The markers can then be managed in the same way as any other marker type in FrameMaker. For people who import XML files that contain comments others generated this is a nice feature to have. Variables and structureAgain, I say “Finally”! In the past, the use of variables and FrameMaker import or export of XML did not work well together. With the new release it is painless to export content with variables and automatically have entities created. This resolves the long standing problem of user variables getting flattened to plain text on export to XML and is a major step forward in resolving what should have been a basic patch in the past. It’s nice to see that aside from major features that have been added there are also small things. Adobe seems to be paying attention to requests from users and looking at the details of the application, not just the features that build marketing hype. Filter by attributeConditions in structured content had always been horrible to work with. FrameMaker added processing instructions to files on export to handle conditional content. This meant a decent amount of work in other tools. It also increased the “look, FrameMaker isn’t doing real XML” complaints from users of other tools since the condition comments only worked in FrameMaker! The new release provides a feature that enables you to filter content by attribute and value, in a manner similar to conditional content. If an element has attributes with specific values FrameMaker can use those attributes and values to filter content. For example, an element with an attribute named Platform with a value set to Windows is filtered and hidden when the Macintosh version of a document is produced. Then, when the Windows version of the document is produced, the filter would display only elements with their Platform attribute value set to Windows.
Unlike the conditional text utility to manage expressions, the attribute filters can have a human friendly name assigned to them as well. Adobe needs to add that to the expressions used in unstructured conditional content to make it even better. With DITA support and the attribute based filtering there is a dramatically improved way to manage content for multiple products, platforms, and audiences at any given time. This feature alone is likely worth the cost of an upgrade if you work with structured content and need conditional content. |
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f you happen to work with structured content in FrameMaker (like more and more clients do), then this is a nice touch. Most of the options that used to branch off the File menu get their own home.
