Some suggestions for improvement of FrameMaker

[Rob Shell]

Dear Framers:
I wonder if we should not air our suggestions for improvements so that we
can establish a priority list. Here are mine.

Some suggestions for improvement of FrameMaker

1. The Find/Change dialogue box is both too small & the displayed characters
are too indistinct to pick up errors e.g. if you type "Cornfield" it should
ALWAYS be clearly distinguishable from "Comfield"
The quotation marks are not uniformly displayed. I know one can change the
windows setting, but this fix changes everything. Perhaps a special 16 pt.
fixed pitch serif font might work.

2. New Feature: It would be useful to have guides which "grow" from the top
or side as in Photoshop.

3. A fuller explanation of errors, e.g. "FrameMaker has encountered a
problem and needs to close" is not good enough. What do the numbers mean?
 
4. New Feature: The ability to generate a flight of endnotes

5. <cntrl> L does not always work. Footnote separator line sometimes
appears, sometimes not.

6. Frame needs better page logic, footnotes should be able to break and not
<sometimes> appear on the page following the footnote call. The easiest fix
would be the ability to have several footnotes on the same line. Thus 
'	              1 Ibid                            2 Ibid
3Shell, "Suggestions".

6. The color selection dropdown list is very slippery. If one has somehow
imported many colors it is very hard to isolate colors which are redundant.
The cursor skids to top or bottom.

7. The paragraph format dialogue is sometimes shy about appearing. The Para
designer is probably the most used (for me anyway) and any stability issues
here are disconcerting.

8 The dialogue boxes in the advanced <T> screen of the para designer does
not sort it's call topics
If you have many call topics it's a pain to find one. Instead they are
listed in order of placement. Thus, if you have a picture of a zoo which you
use often and placed first. Zoo remains at the top of the list.

9. New feature: a preflight test run for books or long documents. It's not
useful that on printing page 1,000 I am told there is an error, or no
graphic. PageMaker did this very well.

10 New feature: FrameMaker should be able to make use of multiprocessors. 

11. The multiple screen display is also poor when using a dialogue display
which stretches across both screens.

12. Get rid of the "The font has changed" message. It hasn't, it won't.

Rob Shell
Windows Seven
FrameMaker 9 patched
4 GB RAM
3 TB hd