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It's Framemaker Month, and its 25th Anniversary

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Fellow Framemaker junkies on the "Framers" list have pointed me to a recent and very upbeat posting on Framemaker, which turns 25 this month. Those who are familiar with my work style know that I've been a Framemaker junkie for about 20 years.

I don't remember if it was back in '91 or '92 that I was inducted into the Framemaker world by Sherwin the Wise (no doubt I have his last name somewhere - Silverman, maybe?). He was a tech writer hired by Secure Computing Corporation to put our technical documentation into professional shape. Sherwin demanded Framemaker. At that time I was still doing a lot of documents in LaTeX, but I was intrigued by this industrial grade WYSIWYG document publisher. And in any case, our main customer at the time in the NSA liked Framemaker far better than they liked Microsoft Word (gag). They would tolerate LaTeX, but they liked Frame.

Now I'm like those pitiful writers of the last century who could only compose creatively if they had their favorite typewriter in front of them. I find it really hard to construct a book without Frame in front of me.

Maxwell Hoffman, who wrote the Content Wrangler posting noted above, believes that Frame has thrived over the past several years. It's true that Adobe has continued to revise and upgrade it and, so far, they haven't managed to break anything I thought essential. Meanwhile they've inserted a bunch of specialized features for XML and DITA publishing, none of which I use.

I love Framemaker for several reasons:

  • It behaves in a sane and predictable manner when you modify or update a heading or paragraph style (called a format in Frame). I can easily start with one format, morph it slightly, and turn it into a new format. I can take an existing format, easily morph it slightly, and instantly apply the changes to all items using that format.
  • I can do all sorts of wonderful numbering tricks. Section and subsection numbering? No problem! It's also easy to set up separate series for numbered lists or paragraphs, for figures, and for tables. I can incorporate chapter and even section numbers into figure or table numbering.
  • Cross references really work. They even work across separate files in a multi-file document. I can retrieve a paragraph's numbering, its text, and/or its page number to display as the cross reference text.
  • The figure diagramming features, while rudimentary, are powerful enough for most of the diagrams I do. Unfortunately, some poor choices in line rendering prevent me from using such diagrams directly in book production - they have to be converted to a safer format first.
  • Multi-file books really work. It's relatively easy to keep formats consistent by copying them between different books. You can build a table of contents or index, or keep a list of footnotes at the end of the chapter (or book) and everything updates correctly.

There are two down sides to Framemaker:

  • The more sophisticated numbering mechanisms rely on arcane coding, much like regular expression queries. I learned the basics from Sherwin, which is why I can make it sing.
  • It only runs on the PC. In my life today, I run Windows 7 on a VM for exactly two reasons, and Frame is one of them.

In addition to countless papers, articles, technical documents, and reports, I've produced three book manuscripts with Framemaker. I've used a Mac to write all three of them. On the first two, Frame ran native on the Mac; on the third it ran under VMWare on the Mac. And on the second book, I did the compositing myself and personally constructed the PDFs that went to the printer.

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