Technical Communication

Dear Vivek,

as I already did on the beta site, a public "Thank you" now for the great job you guys did on FrameMaker 8.

A lot of people including me have subscribed for Unicode support in the past. Now, what we get in FM8 is actually full Unicode support plus tons of new dictionaries, hyphenators and spellcheckers. That's much more than expected. I think the new Unicode and multi-language support is a killer argument for FM8 for everyone with global document publishing requirements.
I guess it will not take very long and we will also see support for the new Unicode Support in FrameMaker 8 by Translation Software Companies like SDL TRADOS. For the meantime, if there is the need to run translation processes, FrameMaker 8 offers the possibility to down save your documents as FrameMaker 7 MIFs. This way you can guide them through the current translation supply chain scenarios.

My personal favorite among the new features is the new "Filter by Attribute" feature. For structured Documents it makes it possible to control content display based on element attribute values. Accompanied by the new powerful conditional text features, this opens a can of new possibilities for single sourcing and shared content scenarios.

I also want to thank for the new transparency and intensive customer communication and encourage Adobe to continue this new strategy with early announcements and early betas. This is something that I really appreciated, especially as I'm aware that (more or less) public betas can mean quite some extra efforts and stress for the development teams and management.

It's a real pleasure to see that Adobe is dedicated to FrameMaker. It is even more exiting to hear, that there is a roadmap for the future and that we have entered a period of accelerated development for FrameMaker. FrameMaker 8 is a great step forward fulfilling customer's needs for better global document publishing possibilities.
I hope we will get a right to left language support (Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, etc.). A big challenge will also be to give FrameMaker a more exciting user interface experience. You will have to walk a tightrope to fulfill today's young professional's user interface expectations while respecting old birds and veterans habits. However, the most important issue will be bigger dialogs that can be resized. But I'm confident that your UI teams will do a great job there as well.

Hope to see you all back again for the FM 9 Beta next year... :-)

Kind regards,
Stefan Gentz
Germany

Thanks Stefan for your comments. We are also excited by the response to FrameMaker 8. - Vivek

I have just downloaded the demo version of FM8 and I am so sad to see that there is no bi-di support in this release. This was a long-waited arrival, but unfortunately it ended up fruitless for all Arabic and other right-to-left languages' users. Is there any plans for bi-di support (via service pack or so? Is there any way now to convert FM8 files to InDesign which supports Arabic perfectly?

We were waiting impatiently for this release and there were some talks going around that it would support Arabic, but... :(

Mohamed Zeid

I think FrameMaker 8 is a great program. When I understood about its release I got excited alot. Now as I have this great program I am happy with it. Great work you have made guys. Congratulations about that.

I am facing hyphenation issues using FM8. I am authoring in German language and this issue is not fixed by the patch p266. How can you help me?

Update (Feb 2008) - FrameMaker 8.0.2 is available. To apply the patch, select Help-> Updates. The patch should be applied only on FrameMaker 8.0.1 (b266). -Vivek