Migrating features over to InDesign

[Lea Rush]

Damn. Thanks for the heads' up. My hope is that once they consider InDesign
to have incorporated Frame's features, they also make the migration of
existing Frame projects reasonably simple.

_________________________________

Lea Rush
Software and Documentation Specialist
Astoria-Pacific International
PO Box 830 Clackamas OR 97015
PH: 800-657-3010
FAX:  503-655-7367
-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com
[mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Paul Findon
Sent: lunes, 29 de septiembre de 2008 01:41 a.m.
To: FrameUsers List
Subject: Migrating features over to InDesign

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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