[Framers] Stefan wanted to know why so many of us Adobe users "feel" the way we do about Adobe

[Peter Gold]

A good reason NOT to speed-read technically-dense material, is that one
tends to take humor seriously. For example, I'm imagining recalling retired
engineers refactoring original FM code into COBOL!  :)


Thanks for the image, Steve!

IIRC, the original proposals for FM were made by language-oriented folks
seeking ways to *process* *language* with computers, rather than engineers
looking for cool stuff to program.

Technical writing is a hybrid of  language and an underlying system to
revise and manipulate it. Those who are good at practicing it, can't help
but want it to continuously improve while serving its purpose, just as they
do.



On Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:23 AM Steve Rickaby <srickaby at wordmongers.com>
wrote:

At 16:55 -0600 12/10/21, <tammyvb at spectrumwritingllc.com> wrote:

>I can give details if interested, but I just wanted to chime in to the
>thread from a few weeks ago, where someone stated that they feel that Adobe
>hates their customers. . .

I think that was me.

Long time past, I took a great many textbooks directly to press using
FrameMaker and PDF as a pre-press format. Problems were few and solvable,
and the only time I had to have recourse to FrameMaker support was in 1997,
when an author, who had written his ms in Frame, had managed to create
massive equations that would not 'fold'. These jobs included more than one
using structure FrameMaker.

All that was in FrameMaker version 7. Judging by what I read here, things
don't seem to have improved much since Adobe hived FrameMaker off to India.

At 19:43 +0000 13/10/21, nuhDEEN wrote:

>However, the effort and expense to maintain the FM might be better spent
on developing a completely new underlying software design that seems to
work the same from a user's point-of-view

I tend to agree: all software eventually 'dies' as technology moves on.
Look at Interleaf, for example. But with the cost and effort required to
rewrite FrameMaker from scratch, including structure support, I don't see
it happening. In theory, though, it can be done incrementally, using code
refactoring.

There is a maybe bright light on the horizon for us old folk. I read that
Cobol programmers can command astronomical fees these days to keep
'essential' banking software alive. Just an idea... :-)

--
Steve
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