Help Creation Flow and Upgrading from version 7.2 to the latest version

[Robert Lauriston]

Fundamentally, unstructured FrameMaker has changed very little. I've
opened FM6 in recent versions and had zero problems. New features have
been added but old things all work pretty much the same.

FM8 switched to Unicode. Anything using the old Zapf Dingbats that was
bundled with FM will need to be redone. Any other symbol or dingbat
font may need cleanup.

FM9 introduced a new UI layered on the old one (when you drill down,
you may still see dialogs unchanged from FM5), which broke a lot of
keyboard shortcuts, many of which they never fixed. If you're used to
driving everything from the keyboard and never touching the mouse,
you'll probably hate it and have a bad month or two getting used to
constantly using the mouse.

FM12 added the core features from RoboHelp (look for "multi-channel
publishing" in the docs), so you probably won't need to upgrade
ePublisher or buy RoboHelp.

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 2:53 AM, Caroline Tabach <Caroline at radcom.com> wrote:
>
> At the moment we are using FrameMaker 7.2 and ePublisher Pro version 9.2 to  create PDF files, and a collections of help files which are mostly html,  with 2 or 3 .chm files
>
> The applications mostly run on Internet Explorer (and the .chm files are for the 2 that are not over IE).
>
> I would like to upgrade our applications as they do not really run on my current operating system and because I want to also produce more modern output.
>
>
> I need to make PDF, ePub, Responsive html and .chm.
>
> What do you all recommend?
> Is FrameMaker 12 enough to use stand alone?
>
> Do I need ePublisher Pro or RoboHelp?
>
> How would I go about importing my Frame 7.2 files into Frame 12.
> Does it support them or would I need to save as MIF and then open the MIF files.
> I have quite a lot of user guides.
>
>  To what extent will FrameMaker let me change the design?
>
> What is the learning curve from 7.2 to 12?