Technical Writing Suite From Adobe

[Bill Briggs]

At 11:41 AM -0700 4/25/06, Daniel Emory wrote:
>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.

 Wouldn't that be a treat. I'd dance naked in the back yard if they did that. Well, okay, they'd have to do an OS X version to get me naked, but it would be a really big deal if they were to do that. I'm so tired of software upgrades that add bullshit features (I'm reminded of Eudora's chili peppers, and ESP groups, or other stuff nobody uses). A few long standing FrameMaker bugs fixed would be nice too (I've always dreamed of a cross-reference marker that worked).

 But I've more or less given up on Adobe doing anything to keep me on FrameMaker. It's a lost cause for us Mac users, and Solaris will be next to go, and then our department is right back to where we were before we bought FrameMaker 4 years ago. Adobe screwed us and torched our "solution". I'm not booting into any Windows OS just to use FrameMaker. The baggage of XP or Vista isn't worth the headache. Every time I use XP in the lab at work I am astonished at how convoluted it is. I'll be fine with LaTeX.

 Pity that Adobe didn't take heed of the suggestions like the ones just offered by Dan. Pity that they didn't fix the footnotes, make it truly cross platform again, and sell into the Academic publishing market. It's huge, and ripe for the plucking. It's now dominated by very unhappy Word users. But we'll never see anything done about this.

 They'll never get another cent of mine.

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