One Mark Pease appears to have created, some years ago, a series of Perl modules for working with Framemaker:
- FrameMaker: Top level FrameMaker interface
- FrameMaker::Control: Control a FrameMaker session
- FrameMaker::FDK: Interface to Adobe FDK
- FrameMaker::MIF: Parse and Manipulate FrameMaker MIF files
These appear to be tremendously useful… at least potentially. But, alas, they seem to have been orphaned, and are no longer available on CPAN.
If anyone has these, or has experience working with them, please post comments with where they can be found, or at least whether they worked.
I’ve occasionally felt inspired to try to take on something like this myself, though I probably wouldn’t go the open source or freeware route.
The Web is full of pages that refer to fmPython, a scripting environment that allows you to script Framemaker operations using the popular Python programming language and
We like this idea– anything that exposes significant FDK functionality but allows access through scripting languages increases people’s ability to adapt Framemaker to their needs and exploit the full capabilities of the software.
However, we can’t find fmPython any more…
We visited http://www.isnet.sk/petrucha/?lang=en&page=scripts, the URL where fmPython is supposed to be hosted, and were greeted with:
Chyba 404 - požadovaná stránka neexistuje
My Slovak’s kinda shaky, but 404 means pretty much the same thing in any language… fmPython’s gone missing.
If anyone out there can provide a working link to a current home for fmPython, we’ll add it to our web site. (In fact, we’d be perfectly willing to host and redistribute fmPython, if someone can provide a copy of the last version.)
This isn’t strictly a Framemaker issue, but given the severity of the exposure, it’s worth talking about.
Several web sites and blogs are reporting a major security hole in Adobe’s Acrobat PDF. (And unlike most such vulnerabilities, whipping boy Internet Explorer isn’t the problem, and Firefoxsters and OperaDivas can’t run around shouting “We’re immune!”) For example:
http://blog.php-security.org/archives/68-Universal-XSS-through-Adope-PDF-Plugin.html
http://davi.poetry.org/blog/?p=998
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?storyid=1999
http://singe.za.net/blog/archives/801-Universal-XSS-in-Adobe-PDF-Browser-Plugin.html
http://michaeldaw.org/md-hacks/backdooring-pdf-files/
Attackers can easily steal cookies from your machine using a cleverly constructed link from any web site that offers PDF– without even having access to the PDF.
Short of client-side fixes, there’s really no defense against this. Adobe will probably move to address this very quickly. (But I guess it means I have to actually accept all those irritating Acrobat security fixes Adobe’s constantly trying to push out to me– along with the Yahoo! Toolbar…)
Anyway, folks– be careful out there.
-The Source
BuildFire 2005 from ConVivio probably isn’t the best-known Framemaker automation tool on the planet, and it’s surely not as flexible as the long-established Framescript… but for a GUI-based tool that lets you create automated document production processes to run on a schedule (such as building your whole documentation library in PDF, HTML and online help every night for QA purposes) it’s pretty sweet, and looks like it can do the job without requiring you to write any code at all.
If it had been “BuildFire 2002″ I’d have been very interested in it myself…
