TechComm Central by Adobe

There is a a considerable contrast between Microsoft Word and FrameMaker regarding the way that styles, catalogs and removal of format overrides are handles. Word displays character styles (e.g. emphasized words) and paragraph styles (e.g. lists of headings) together in one style catalog. FrameMaker has a separate catalog for: paragraph styles character styles table styles read more…

FrameMaker 11’s structured editing features and XML support have come a long way from the model introduced ten years ago with FrameMaker 7.0. That earlier release of FrameMaker combined two earlier separate products (Regular FrameMaker and FrameMaker+SGML), granting customers a “two-for-one” authoring solution; every copy of FrameMaker 7.x could produce either traditional unstructured documents, or read more…

Since the release of FrameMaker 11 in late July, more and more DITA and XML professionals (as well as authors or unstructured data) have been discovering advantages to the many new product features. Tassos Anastasiou has been very visible in the FrameMaker community for years. The following is a brief review by Tassos (published here read more…

I’m very excited to introduce the all new Adobe Technical Communication Suite 4. When I go meet with our customers, I hear that their consumers demand technical content to be easily consumable, highly interactive, quickly searchable, immediately actionable, and always available on-the-move. The movement to structured authoring is picking up. The rapid penetration of handheld read more…

Amongst the many compelling reasons for upgrading from FrameMaker 7.x to FrameMaker 10, real “out-of-the-box” DITA support would surely be near the top of the list. Although FrameMaker 7.x was a competent and potent structured editor in its day, it was developed before most major milestones in DITA development and approval were achieved. A timeline read more…

Book building capabilities for managing multiple project assets (chapters, document content) were one of the prime drivers for many users moving to FrameMaker 7.x ten years ago. Ironically, the powers associated with this feature have increased exponentially with recent releases. For anyone who has to manage multiple chapters in various stages of approval, enhanced hierarchical read more…

This is Part 6 in our 10-part series of blogs on why users should upgrade from FrameMaker 7.x to FrameMaker 10, which summarizes all blogs in the series.  Please click on the titles below to go to any individual blog, in order, or per your areas of interest. You will find a call to action read more…

Midway through our series of blogs on reasons to upgrade from FrameMaker 7.x, we take a quick trip back to the year of that software’s birth: 2002. A lot can change in 10 years. Not just styles, fads, fashions, but the fundamental way that we communicate. Despite the almost nostalgic communication methods of 10 years read more…

Speaking from my over one thousand hours of experience “optimizing” unstructured FrameMaker files for translation and localization, I can vouch for the following fact: FrameMaker 10’s ability to handle catalog styles more efficiently than FrameMaker 7.x and its ability search and locate format overrides can reduce some production preparation tasks by as much as 90%! read more…

Versions of FrameMaker after FrameMaker 7.2 introduced two potent features that could be reason alone to upgrade to FrameMaker 10: (a) track changes and (b) ability to import PDF review comments and annotations “in place” in the source FrameMaker document. Both of the features streamline the edit and review process substantially. Sample documents used for read more…