Where on Adobe is the info/link to renew my maintenance contract for FrameMaker?

[Syed Zaeem Hosain (Syed.Hosain@aeris.net)]

Your point is well-taken. Perhaps, I should instead say that I will stop at version 11 and not upgrade to any future version of FrameMaker. The upgrade price was already getting too high for what I need/use from this tool - the previous upgrades at $199 per year were easier to justify, and I held off making a decision for 2 years based on the low cost of the Update Plan.

My reasoning (perhaps faulty by your approach, but "it is what it is" for me) being that when I use a tool all the time for my work, I stay up on the latest versions. Perhaps, the false "comfort" that some bug or the other is fixed in later versions is the rationale.

BTW, with regard to other Adobe tools, I can usually find much lower cost alternatives that do what I need (this is just my personal viewpoint, and does not apply to other folks, of course ... if anyone prefers Adobe tools, fine!) For example, I use Xara Photo and Graphic Designer over Adobe Photoshop, and Magix Movie Edit Pro over Adobe Premiere.

But, for many years, FrameMaker was simply unique in its document creation capabilities - hence I used it for all my documentation work. And even for simple short writing work (memos, reports, etc.) that I do all the time. But, as of last week, for these simple, "few-page", uncomplicated documents that don't have complex editing or formatting needs, I have switched to Word and it going fine.

BTW, Adobe Acrobat Pro is also something I may drop soon. I have been using it for _many_ years, but it is time to find alternatives since its upgrade pricing is high - much more than other similar products _list_ price. And the Update Plan for it is no longer available to me either, from what I can tell.

For example, with a very quick search, one of the best I have seen so far is BCL Technologies "easyPDF" printer. At $29.95, it does what I need, and [limited] tests using a trial version show it producing perfectly good PDF output files. It also generates _many_ times faster than Acrobat Pro. Last night, I printed a 30+ page FrameMaker document as a test, and the output file was written in under 1 second and was about 30% smaller than the one from Acrobat Pro. The same FrameMaker book took almost a minute to generate a PDF output file using Acrobat Pro.

Z

-----Original Message-----
From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of Robert Lauriston
Sent: Monday, April 01, 2013 6:50 PM
To: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: Where on Adobe is the info/link to renew my maintenance contract for FrameMaker?

Why do you feel a need to stop using FrameMaker just because you don't want to send Adobe any more money?

I own a number of old Adobe apps that still work fine. I use Photoshop
5 and Acrobat 8 all the time. I still have FrameMaker 6 and Illustrator 7, though haven't had reason to install them on my most recent PC.