FM 9 Upgrade - Please share your views

[Dov Isaacs]

To be fairly clear about this, FrameMaker never natively supported import of Visio drawings. What FrameMaker does support is Microsoft's OLE, Object Linking and Embedding protocol by which you can place content from one application into another effectively as a Window to that application. In the case cited, whenever FrameMaker would encounter a .VSD file, it would effectively run Visio via OLE to get display or print GDI stream associated with that content. In other words, FrameMaker knows nothing about what is in the .VSD file, but lets Windows dynamically handle the association between .VSD and Visio as well as the requests to Visio to return the appropriate display and/or print GDI data. This linkage also allows for clicking on such data and allowing the edit of the data in the OLE-compliant application, in this case Visio.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has increasingly backed off of enthusiastic support for OLE over the last eight to ten years. They pulled OLE support from the Macintosh (never was a MacOS X version). The Visio OLE implementation seems to have always been somewhat problematic. And reports are that Windows XP SP3 caused further incompatibilities. (It is this general lack of continued support by Microsoft even back in 1999 plus a few other technical factors that lead Adobe to not support OLE in InDesign!)

I tried a sample .VSD import (actually object placement) into a FrameMaker 8 document under Vista 32-bit SP1. It seemed to work although Visio 2007 SP1 seems to crash every time it closes. When I get back into the office on Monday, I'll attempt to see whether FrameMaker 9 likewise works with OLE and Visio 2007 in my environment.

However, because of any number of problems we have heard about with XP SP3, I cannot vouch for the FrameMaker, OLE, and Visio combination working if you upgrade to FrameMaker 9. Too many variable outside of Adobe's control here.

In general, though, even if you could get a FrameMaker / OLE / Visio combination to work, I would most strongly advise that you migrate away from this type of solution given its general instability and Microsoft's apparent lack of commitment to it in both Windows and Visio. A more stable solution is creation of PDF from Visio and placement of that PDF into FrameMaker!

                - Dov

From: Tarlochan S. Nahal
Sent: Friday, January 23, 2009 1:03 PM





Dear Frame Users,



We are a small Tech Pubs group using FM 7.2 on Windows XP platform. Recently, it started to behave strangly and refused to import any Visio drawings. There seems to be no known cure for it with the current setup. Maybe it was automatic Windows SP upgrade that did the mischief. It suddenly stopped accepting Visio drawings in their native format (.vsd). The situation is so bad that even if we can import a Visio drawing, we are not able to save the document until we purge that drawing!



I called Adobe Tech Support few times and finally learned from them that they do not support Visio on FM 7.2 anymore!  Of course, we can import jpeg, pdf, tiff, etc. So we are contemplating on upgrading to FM 9.



I would appreciate if some of you could answer some of my questions.



1. Is it backward compatible with older versions? If so, how far back does it go? For example, can it open FM 6 docs and Save As FM6 or FM7 docs?



2. We use FM 7.x templates. Would there be any compatibility issues?



3. What are the primary new features of FM9 and what is your overall experience with it?



I will appreciate any feedback.



Regards



Tarlochan S. Nahal



Sr. Technical Writer