Structured Framemaker, FDK and XML Blog

With the press release, at least, of Framemaker 8 available, let’s look at the high spots:

• Framemaker Unicode Support — Unvarnished good. Multilingual content is a drag to handle unless this is in place. Thanks to Adobe for catching up with globalization/internationalization the reality of multilingual text.
• Rich Media — My first reaction to embedding Flash and other rich media like video and audio in Framemaker is, “So what?” Then again, there are those who use Flash, viewlets, audio and so on for creating supplemental online course material that takes advantage of PC video, animation and so on to deliver training, and that’s another reality that Adobe had to catch up with. My own work hasn’t involved this much, but some technical writers and courseware developers will welcome this.
• Improved XML/DITA/structured authoring support — Sure sounds good. Structured authoring has been a drag, worse so because of the amount of custom EDD/DTD development required to really get an efificent workflow going on XML document writing, especially on long documents. Darwin demands evolution; Darwin Information Typing architecture is the next evolution in technical publishing.
• Multi-level Undo (Had to throw that in there– I know, it’s been around a while, but it’s been so remarkable that they didn’t before that I’ve often wondered what Framemaker developers were thinking/doing…).
• Upgrade pricing — Framemaker has always been expensive– too expensive, I think. but still… there are few substitutes when you need it. Nice to see an upgrade.
• Availability — Sooner is better, rather than later. Not to mention the fact that organizations of any size won’t take it immediately… better to get your 1.0 (or rather 8.0) release out and then let your customers run a “field beta” for you.

Some nice work, some ho-hum. Let’s see how this update looks in 6 months.

Also to be seen : does this break a lot of framemaker add-ons? does it supersede them? We’ll see.