Creating Popup menus in FrameMaker

[Peter Gold]

Hi, Bill, Dan, and all:

At 8:46 PM -0300 4/26/06, Bill Briggs wrote:
>Yeah, it would be a really great thing to have all of FrameMaker's 
>hypertext capabilities survive to PDF. But we'll see a plethora of 
>tiny little Photoshop-style pallets before we'll see something 
>useful like what Dan was talking about. Makes you wonder what drives 
>the decision mechanism (if there is one) regarding software 
>improvements. Once FrameMaker is reduced to a single platform, down 
>from the glory days when it was on many. Two great quotes from the 
>Wikipedia entry for FrameMaker.
>
>"At the height of its success, FrameMaker ran on more than thirteen 
>UNIX platforms, including NeXT Computer's NeXTSTEP and IBM's AIX 
>operating systems."
>
>"Frame Technology later ported FrameMaker to Microsoft Windows, but 
>the company lost direction soon after its release."

I'm not sure if you'd find it by digging in Wikipedia, but to put 
your point in context, it helps to know that in the early days of 
unix and FrameMaker, as with the early days of CP/M, each hardware 
manufacturer had a proprietary version of the OS, which required 
software to be written, converted, adapted, or "ported" to run on it. 
To sell these adamantly-independent hardware platforms, their 
manufacturers like Pyramid, Sequent, CGI, NeXT, and others PAID BIG 
BUCKS to companies like Frame Technology, Sybase, and others whose 
software they wanted to offer to attract customers. NeXT even bundled 
FrameMaker 3.x with its machines.

In its early years, Sun required its resellers to sell a certain 
amount of software and support with each workstation, to avoid having 
resellers compete solely on bottom-dollar hardware prices and leave 
customers with no software and no support. FrameMaker on Solaris was 
a common component in those packages; both companies benefited.

Actually, FrameMaker was ported to Macintosh before Windows, because 
Windows at the time was too wimpy to support it.

While it's easy to point to what FrameMaker still hasn't incorporated 
from the long-standing user wish list, it's pretty remarkable to look 
back all the way to the FrameMaker 2.x era and see how much of the 
product's current productive feature set was built into it so early 
on.

It's quite correct to say that the code base evolved to a point 
that's nearly impossible to maintain, as features have been added and 
refined. This is what's holding back the ability to evolve on any of 
the remaining supported platforms, or those that have been dropped.

While many of us are quite inconvenienced by not having Mac OS X 
FrameMaker, how many users do we hear from who miss FrameMaker on 
Pyramid, Sequent, or NeXT? What's interesting about unix, is that 
it's easy to run FrameMaker on one Solaris machine and serve it to 
whole enterprises of users who connect to it from other unix 
platforms. It's not emulation, dual-boot, or virtual-machine - it's 
just unix.

As far as lack of support for converting the FrameMaker's advanced 
hypertext features - pop-up menus, button matrixes, etc. to other 
distribution formats - mif2go and WebWorks Publisher Professional 
accomplish these behaviors in HTML with somewhat less complex 
preparation in FrameMaker than FrameMaker's own steps require. I 
believe that some of these can also be accomplished in PDF with some 
of Shlomo Perets' tools.

It's half full, IMO. But, like most FrameMaker users, I expect at 
least three-quarters full. Hoping for more...

________________
Regards,

Peter Gold
KnowHow ProServices