Technical Writing Suite From Adobe

[Daniel Emory]

The "Content Wrangler's" "vision" of FrameMaker’s
future is fatally flawed. It would do little to
improve the quality of on-line help, or increase the
penetration of FrameMaker into the on-line help
market.

Some years back, I wrote an article entitled "Thoughts
About On-Line Help", which is still available at:

www.microtype.com/resources/articles/OLdocs-DE.pdf

I still stand by most of the criteria and conclusions
discussed in that article, and very few. if any,
on-line help documents today come anywhere close to
meeting those criteria.

THE FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEM WITH ON-LINE HELP is that it
delivers the content in HTML, XHTML or XML.This means
it relies almost solely on the canonical simple
cross-reference link: xlink:href="students.xml" to
implement the hypertext capability. NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
Although the XLink standard defines some additional
link types, none of them are now implementable in
FrameMaker, and few, if any, web browser or on-line
help products have been updated to support those
additional XLink capabilities.

BY CONTRAST, FrameMaker (since the early 1990s)
implements, in addition to the canonical
cross-reference link, 23 robust types of hypertext
links, including: GoToLink, Named Destination, Alert,
Alert with Title, Go to URL (launches browser and
displays the specified web page), Jump to Page Number,
Jump to Previous Page, Jump to Next Page, Jump Back,
Jump Back and Fit to Page, Open Document, Open
Document and Fit to Page, Open Document as New, Open
Document at Page Number, Pop-Up Menu, Button Matrix,
Message Client (communicates with other applications
and creates a link to a URL), Close Current Window,
Close All Hypertext Windows, and Exit Application.

Some of these link types (Alert, Alert with Title,
Pop-Up Menu, Button Matrix) require part of their
implementation to be accomplished on reference pages.
In addition, it should be possible to use the
reference page methodology to implement all of the
link types defined in the XLink standard.

By inserting graphic buttons with embedded hypertext
commands on FrameMaker master pages, navigation bars
can be easily implemented. I’ve implemented large
FrameMaker hypertext documents in which such
master-page navigation bars were used to provide
buttons such as "Global" (clicking on this button
produced a menu of links to major subject areas, plus
hypertexted tables of contents, indexes and
glossaries), Local (clicking on this button produces a
menu of links to locations within the current subject
area), Previous (jumps to the location of the previous
link), and Next (goes to the next page).

UNFORTUNATELY, nearly all of FrameMaker’s linking
capabilities are not convertible to PDF, HTML, XHTML
or XML. The only viewing software that implemented all
of them was the now-defunct FrameViewer product.

WHAT I PROPOSE INSTEAD is that Adobe provide a new
version of FrameMaker that includes (in addition to
all the existing link types) the new types specified
in the XLink standard, and also provide an upgraded
version of Acrobat that can, when a FrameMaker file is
saved as PDF, preserve all those link types. 

PDF has already become a de-facto web standard because
of its superior readability, bookmarks, thumbnails,
and forms capabilities. Adding all of FrameMaker’s
superior hyperlink capabilities to PDF would vastly
expand penetration into web content and on-line help
development. And FrameMaker would replace Robohelp,
Winhelp and similar products as the publishing system
of choice for delivering web and on-line help content
as PDF.

Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
<danemory7224 at sbcglobal.net>