Creating Popup menus in FrameMaker

[Bill Briggs]

At 9:18 PM -0500 4/26/06, Peter Gold wrote:
>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.

 Yes, they mention the lower pricing of the Windows version and how it was an issue in the Wiki. And they mention the investment of platform manufacturers. I just thought it was interesting that once Frame Technology got mixed up with the Windows world, that's when it all fell apart. Flirt with the Borg and you take the consequences...


>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.

 I know. I have a copy of FrameMaker 2.1 for the Mac here somewhere. But I didn't use it a LOT until version 3, which I'd still use ahead of Word, if that were the choice.

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