Need a good introductory tutorial for FrameMaker 12

[Fred Ridder]

"Total ignorance" is probably overstating it, but one fundamental fact you have missed is that PageMaker and FrameMaker do *not* have a common ancestry. What they have in common (besides the coincidental similarity in their names) is that they were both acquired as mature products by Adobe. 

PageMaker was originally developed by Aldus Corporation with the original Macintosh version released in 1985 and a version for Windows 1.0 two years later. The company and its products were acquired by Adobe in 1994, and the product was eventually discontinued in 2004. 

FrameMaker, on the other hand, was originally developed by an astrophysics grad student at Columbia. An entrepreneur saw a demo version running on a Sun workstation and formed a company, Frame Technology, to commercialize it circa 1985. Originally it ran only on SunOS, but it was also ported to other flavors of UNIX in its early years. In 1990 a Mac version appeared, and a Windows version followed two years later. The lower-cost Mac and Windows versions killed the sales of the much more expensive UNIX version and the company's sales and profit steadily slid toward zero before Adobe purchased them in 1995. 

Also, the two products do not (or rather, *did* not since PageMaker is a dead issue) the same thing. PageMaker was intended for things like brochures, newsletters, and magazines, where each page is likely to have a different layout. FrameMaker is intended for long documents (e.g. books) with consistent, repetitive page layouts. It can do page-by-page layouts, but not very flexibly and not very efficiently because that's not what it was designed for. 

-Fred Ridder

> From: urszulawitherell at jetsetcom.net
> Subject: Re: Need a good introductory tutorial for FrameMaker 12
> Date: Thu, 23 Jan 2014 12:24:16 -0500
> To: david.h.downing at gmail.com
> CC: framers at lists.frameusers.com
> 
> David, just be sure you do not compare FrameMaker to PageMaker. Two different worlds, one long gone and replaced by InDesign.
> 
> FrameMaker is more like a very able text processor with focus on text content, rather than layout of individual pages. Be sure you cover master pages, format tags and catalogs.
> 
> Enjoy,
> 
> Urszula Witherell
> www.jetsetcom.net | www.trainingonsite.com
> 301.524.3165
> 
> Sent from iPad
> 
> > On Jan 22, 2014, at 12:47 PM, David Downing <david.h.downing at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > I just downloaded the 30 trial version of FrameMaker 12. I have never used FrameMaker at all (although I have used its predecessor, PageMaker). I need to find a good tutorial that will get me started with FrameMaker 12, and that begins by assuming total ignorance of the product. Can anybody point me in the right direction? Thanks.
> > _______________________________________________

 		 	   		  
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