Release Date for FrameMaker 8?

[Shlomo Perets]

Dieter,

You wrote:

>Seen from multi-language publishing point of view the recent update
>FM 7.2p158 is the most important one for the last years
>http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3332
>If a company wants to stick to FrameMaker for the next years and produces 
>documentation for the European countries I strongly recommend to update as 
>soon as possible.
>Multiple Undo, numerous bug fixes and the XML related improvements are 
>really a good basis for the future of Desktop Publishing with or without 
>XML and be worth the upgrade costs. ...

Just for the record: with very few exceptions, the "numerous bug fixes" you 
are referring to are related to new issues introduced in FM7.2
(i.e. for those who did not upgrade to FM7.2, the bug fixes are pretty 
insignificant, other than the limited support for some of the missing 
characters in the Cyrillic, Central European and Baltic codepages; I am not 
sure as to mouse wheel support).
[... and no comments as to the FM7.2 Multiple Undo]

But let's hope that next version of FrameMaker -- whatever its number is 
and whenever it is released -- along with useful new functions/features, 
will address some of the bugs that have been logged with FrameMaker 5.0 
(1994) or earlier, and are brought up in this forum from time to time 
(refreshing the screen, dialog box sizing, table sorting issues, 
conditional text, spelling, graphic output problems, and many other issues).

And hopefully next version of FM will have a better online help. The help 
system for 7.0 was used as is in 7.1 and 7.2 , with its left-over "see on 
page" references, along with other problems.
According to the version information, the online help for FM7.2 was 
compiled on March 14, 2002 -- i.e. three and a half years before the actual 
product was shipped.

Development efforts of the next FM version should also not neglect the PDFs 
manuals included with the product (content as well as interactivity; 
usefulness as on-screen PDFs is a plus). It would be nice if the FrameMaker 
Character Sets PDF is finally inspected and fixed. The FM6.0 version was 
used as is in all subsequent versions (including 7.2), despite its reported 
inaccuracies. Having all links work in the PDFs would also be nice.

Some examples for the above are at:
http://www.microtype.com/Hmmms.html#0511
http://www.microtype.com/Hmmms.html#0404
http://www.microtype.com/Hmmms.html#0312


Shlomo Perets

MicroType, http://www.microtype.com
Training, consulting & add-ons: FrameMaker, Structured FM and Acrobat