Framemaker to Apple's Pages

[Steve Rickaby]

>Thanks, Steve. By the way, the FrameMaker for Mac OS X petition is almost at 3,300 signatories.

That's good to know - if I could sign again, I would. After fourteen years of FrameMaker, I'm currently going into new areas (complex designs, structure), and even now learning new stuff and new techniques, and am being constantly delighted with what I can achieve with FrameMaker.

>I did a detailed comparison with Pages 1.0 and it shows real promise. The real-time page updating while resizing or moving objects on a page is really cool - something even InDesign can't do.
><http://www.infopage.net/fmforosx/fmcompared.html>

I'll take a look at that, although Pages is really only of passing interest to me unless it reaches version, oh, er... 6? ;-)

>However, it is only version one and I think software generally reaches a maturity at around version three, so I wouldn't use it for serious work. Having said that, Apple may release Pages 2.0 at the upcoming San Francisco Macworld Expo in January as part of the iWork '06 package and that may have the additional functionality to make it a more viable alternative to FrameMaker.

It will be interesting, but I don't think Apple is developing Pages as a replacement for FrameMaker - although I could be proved wrong.

>Apple is still using FrameMaker 6.0 in the Classic environment to produce its own user guides and I'm curious as to what they will use in the future. It does seem ironic that with all that super-cool technology even Apple is still replying on Mac OS 9 to produce its user guides. Then again, we do and some Adobe employees do, too.

... and I do too, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future, even to the point of not buying any Apple machine that cannot run Classic. (I even considered buying a quad-core 2.5 GHz G5 to put on the shelf until I need it.)
-- 
Steve