Finally Upgrading to FM 9.0

[Reng, Dr. Winfried]

Hi Clint,

> Our Tech Pubs group is finally on the verge of upgrading from 
> FM 7.0 to
> 9.0. We will not be buying the full TC4.
> 
> First, do you see any problems with just opening our old unstructured
> templates and saving them again as the new version? I don't 
> expect there
> would be any.

If you don't use special codepage fonts, I wouldn't expect problems.
However, I know that some do a MIF-wash for all files and create the
book and the generated files from scratch.

> Second, various members of our group use different versions 
> of Acrobat,
> from 6.0 standard to 9.0 pro, mostly 7.0 pro. Is there any compelling
> reason or technical necessity for us all to upgrade to Acrobat 9.0? I
> know that FM will create PDF on its own without Acrobat, but seem to
> remember that some or many features are lost in doing so. 

The FrameMaker installation installs Acrobat Distiller without user interface 
and less functionality. You should _not_ install this add-on, if you already 
have Acrobat installed. FrameMaker uses the Distiller variant which is 
installed on your system to create PDF files. FrameMaker cannot create PDF
files without any Distiller variant.

I do not know, whether FrameMaker 9 knows the path to the joboptions files of
older Distiller versions. I also would expect that certain features (CMYK,
SaveAs PDF) wouldn't work. Possibly others know more.

Best regards

Winfried