FrameMaker 7 Product Development

[Seanb_us]

Adobe actively prevents those in-the-know from talking about products under development.

Several rumors and questions about the future of FrameMaker keep appearing in the FrameMaker forums. Consider information posted here as from uninformed outsiders . . . informed insiders are prohibited from letting on . . ..

[Seanb_us]

Life and Death of FrameMaker

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• I am told, in these forums, that Adobe has announced the on-going development of FrameMaker 7, to include more XML functionality.
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• I have no information about what that means beyond what is stated.
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• I have no information about any release dates.
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• I have no information about any intermediate FrameMaker releases . . . such as FrameMaker 6.5. There is a FrameMaker 6.0 update available at http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/fmwin.htm. This updates FrameMaker 6 to version 6.0p405.
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• Any rumors of FrameMaker's demise as a product are clearly unfounded. These rumors have been pretty cyclical for years . . ..
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• I recommend you direct any inquiries about future versions of FrameMaker or future features to those VARs or Adobe sales reps who sold you your current version of the Product.

Sean

[Seanb_us]

See also Dr. John Warnock's keynote address to the 1999 FrameUser's conference, http://www.frameusers.com.

In short, Dr. Warnock says FrameMaker is here to stay and links that to his own tenure at Adobe.

[Seanb_us]

Unicode

Per Lee Richardson (Senior FrameMaker Engr Mgr for Adobe) on the FrameUsers forum ( http://www.frameusers.com ), and paraphrased here by me:

There will be no Unicode support in the next version of FrameMaker.

Unicode support requires significant rework and will present problems swapping FrameMaker files between older versions of the product. Full Unicode compliance in the industry is rare and there are other ways to support extended character sets. That being said, Lee did seem to indicate that support for full-Unicode or a subset of Unicode is a high priority for the release that follows the next one.

[Seanb_us]

OS X and Carbon

Per Lee Richardson on the FrameUsers forum ( http://www.frameusers.com ), and paraphrased here by me:

There will be no OS X native support or Carbonized version of the next version of FrameMaker.

Per Lee, work was started on developing a Carbonized version of FrameMaker for OS X, but that work was dropped from the current development cycle due to the unstable nature of the OS X operating system at the time and the possibility of needing separate FrameMaker binary files for OS X.

Per Lee, an OS-X version of FrameMaker is a priority for the release of FrameMaker after the next.

[Seanb_us]

FrameMaker 7 Announced!

http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/pdfs/nfh.pdf

http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/main.html

http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/newfeatures.html

http://www.adobe.com/products/fmserver