Migrating features over to InDesign
Paul Findon
pfindon at infopage.net
Mon Sep 29 01:40:51 PDT 2008
Framers,
Following the recent discussion of FM features migrating to InDesign,
here's a snippet from an interview between Adobe Co-Chairman John
Warnock and Conrad Taylor, BCS Electronic Publishing Specialist Group
in 2004.
Paul
Interviewer: Adobe has found itself in the situation of owning three
page make-up systems: PageMaker, InDesign and FrameMaker. I’m not
counting Illustrator for these purposes. When one starts to think
about Adobe getting involved in document composition issues, it’s
time to pull out the flipchart and brainstorm about what are the
important aspects of document composition to support; which direction
to go. Those of us who use these tools often look around at other
software: 3B2 does this, Xyvision does this, Quark does this;
wouldn’t it be nice to put them all in the blender, so to speak, and
extract one ideal application.
Warnock: Well, that’s a complicated problem. And there’s a fair bit
of disagreement inside of Adobe as to what the appropriate thing is
to do. PageMaker as a codebase was just very long in the tooth: it
was not a maintainable codebase. It was clear when we acquired it
that it was not going to last for very long. Too much spaghetti-code:
very difficult. InDesign had just started as a project when we
acquired Aldus, and we continued with a very strong group of people:
Robert Brainsea and Zak Williamson, and a very strong group of people
who built the architecture for InDesign. But they were coming at it
from a very ‘let’s go build magazines’ kind of perspective. Then
there was the other set of the world that works with highly
structured documents, and the FrameMaker world. And I absolutely love
FrameMaker; I’ve been a very strong proponent of FrameMaker. But
FrameMaker was also suffering from an old codebase. Essentially, the
idea is to start migrating features over to InDesign. Unfortunately,
the InDesign crowd doesn’t understand the structured document world
as well as they need to, and so that migration has been coming along
more slowly than I would have liked it to have been.
Interviewer: Some of the pagination issues, and table-handling…
Warnock: Yes, and cross-referencing, and forward-referencing, and all
the things about dealing with highly structured documents. I’m a
structured-document person: I like them!
Interviewer: You’re in good company here! I’ve been using FrameMaker
for Macintosh since version 2.1. And now I shall be using Frame 7.0
on the Mac under Classic mode – for the rest of time, perhaps.
Warnock: Well hopefully someday there will be a version of InDesign
that will have the same properties. And to InDesign’s credit, there
are people who have done math plug-ins and have started to get the
more arcane things into InDesign. But they haven’t fundamentally
solved the structure problem.
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