FM 9 Upgrade - Please share your views

[Tarlochan S. Nahal]

Dear Richard Combs,
 
I appreciate your detailed response. Actually, I had posted a message realated to Visio sometime around late August 2008 on the framers list. There were some good responses, but there was no real solution. The problem was triggered by XP SP3 upgrade that altered something in the OS which caused FM to become hostile to Visio, or perhaps it was triggered by some sort of built-in timer in FM itself. (I guess Adobe makes money by selling upgrades!) 
 
Yes, we moved Visio files as OLE objects into FM. Naturally, it does have the application overhead, but the output is better and making any changes is easier. Some of our  engineering drawings are done in Visio and it makes it easier for us to stick to that format.
 
Adobe Tech Support told me few days ago that FM9 does support Visio. I will download the trial version and try it and see how it works.
 
Again, thanks for sharing you experience.
 
Best regards
 
Tarlochan S. Nahal
Sr. Technical Writer
 
Atheros Communications, Inc.
 


--- On Fri, 1/23/09, Combs, Richard <richard.combs at Polycom.com> wrote:

From: Combs, Richard <richard.combs at Polycom.com>
Subject: RE: FM 9 Upgrade - Please share your views
To: tnahal99 at yahoo.com, framers at lists.frameusers.com
Date: Friday, January 23, 2009, 1:50 PM

Tarlochan S. Nahal wrote:
 
> 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!

FM has _never_ been able to import native Visio files. You weren't
previously importing _files_, you were importing OLE2 _objects_ (complete with
all the Visio application overhead and potential instability). If you moved an
FM file containing those OLE2 links onto a PC that didn't have Visio
installed, the links would be broken, even if the Visio files were there. The
links open Visio.

IMHO, OLE linking and embedding was never a very good idea except for casual,
occasional use. 

There was some discussion on this list a while ago about an XP upgrade that
introduced the more serious problem you're seeing. Use Google to search the
archives (by adding "site:lists.frameusers.com" after your search
string) for posts about Visio import. 

I don't think upgrading to FM 9 will solve your problem. Unless it was
added very late in the development cycle (I haven't used the released
version), FM 9 doesn't have a Visio file import filter either. 

Assuming you have the full version of Acrobat, the best way to include Visio
drawings is to make PDFs and import those into FM. Your archive search should
turn up a post or three of mine discussing this. 

All that said, upgrading to FM 9 offers a number of other benefits. It supports
Unicode (introduced in FM 8), which is a big deal if your docs need to be
translated. It has a very slick, highly configurable new interface. It can
import comments/edits from a review PDF and manage them through the Track Text
Edits feature. Books are much more flexible in FM 9 -- they can be nested,
contain folders, etc. And there's lots of new stuff relating to structure,
all of which means nothing to me right now. :-)

FM 9 can open older FM docs, but it can only save back to FM 8 (in binary
form). You can save as a 7.2-compatible MIF file, however. Any older files you
open, templates or not, are converted to FM 9 format when you save them. 

So by all means, upgrade. But you'll still need to change your workflow
regarding Visio. 

PDF, I tell you! PDF! :-)

Richard


Richard G. Combs
Senior Technical Writer
Polycom, Inc.
richardDOTcombs AT polycomDOTcom
303-223-5111
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rgcombs AT gmailDOTcom
303-777-0436
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