[Closed] FrameMaker 7.x/8 Feature Requests

I would not mind many of these add-on requests, *if* they were developed as external plug-ins one could turn off to fight bloat.

Re Ken's request...<br /><br />>>5. A grammar checker. Currently, I copy the text of my documents to word, and use it to point out grammatical errors. It'd be nice if I could check the grammar from within Framemaker.<<<br /><br />...please, NO! A grammar checker offers (IMHO) not only no value but *negative* value, and its inclusion in any new version will be, at best, a waste of code. Let me explain:<br /><br />I confess at the beginning that the only grammar checker I have significant experience with is Word's, and perhaps (almost certainly) there are better ones. But because human language in general, and English in particular, is so syntactically diverse and variable, I sincerely doubt that any current software can adequately identify all the possible grammatically acceptable structures. Here's an example from this morning's work: In a memo I was reviewing, Word had marked "that" as an error, suggesting "which" as a replacement. As you might guess, the "that" in question followed a comma, and Word was interpreting it as an incorrectly restrictive relative pronoun. As it happened, though, the relative clause in question *was* restrictive; the comma was actually the closing comma of a pair that set off a parenthetical aside. The sentence was correct as written, and not a particularly exotic syntactical structure either, yet Word recommended "fixing" it in a way that would actually *create* an error. This is absolutely common: Word suggests incorrect or unnecessary "corrections" FAR more often than it fixes actual errors. As an editor, I can reliably identify authors who rely on the grammar checker by the specific errors I find in their work. Unless you flunked 6th grade English (or substitute your native language), *YOU* are almost certainly a better grammar checker than any software.<br /><br />This is emblematic of what's wrong with Word: It's full of "features" that ostensibly make it easier to produce good writing, but in fact make it harder. Let's not beg Adobe to infect FrameMaker with the same disease, shall we?<br /><br /><climbing down off my soapbox now... ;^) ><br /><br />-Bill

Cool Arnis. How much?

> When I change printers, the fonts change slightly,

Check to see you're NOT using printer-resident fonts for which you don't have the actual font on your system. For more information about this, see www.techknowledgecorp.com/help and look for "Where do fonts come from?" in the left column.

I'd like to request five things.
1. Linux support.
2. Better typography for mathematics. In particular, the placement of operands on the large operators is poor (summation, integral, etc.). Typically, the vertical spacing is much too great, making the equations unattractive and causing them to take up too much space.
3. A fix to the shrink wrap problem on equations. When I change printers, the fonts change slightly, meaning that the equations no longer fit properly in their shrink wrapped frames. The frames should automatically re size, or at worst, there should be a "re-shrink wrap all shrink wrapped equations" function.
4. Provide a new type of floating table: "float to top of page". It would float to the top of the current page if it could do so with out pushing the reference on to the next page, otherwise it would float to the next page. This would increase the likelihood that the floating table would actually be found on the page where it was referenced, and would also reduce the fragmentation of the page that results from having tables in the middle of the page. And while you are at it, perhaps you can fix the long standing floating table bug.
5. A grammar checker. Currently, I copy the text of my documents to word, and use it to point out grammatical errors. It'd be nice if I could check the grammar from within Framemaker.

-Ken

Surprized I haven't seen anything about Better Mouse Support, (WHEEL). It comes up frequently enought in this forum.

Seeing that announcement for 7.1 not being available for Macs seems to me to be the writing on the wall for us Mac users. I'd sure like to hear otherwise, officially or semi-officially. And NO, we're not switching to windows machines for the sake of this one software. We'll just have to figure out another workflow.

--Ron

First above all: an OS X native version. Our workflow is based entirely on Mac. When we have that, how about native support for layered Photoshop images?
Regarding the alternative software suggestions, in my experience Word and ID-CS are not options for long technical manuals that require routine updates. I manage safety training and lab teaching manuals for a university science department. The text in all the manuals is updated twice yearly to reflect changes in protocols or regulations, requests from instructors, etc. Text rewrites alone take a month; who knows how long renumbering all the protocols, subsections, etc., manually could take. That eliminates ID-CS.
Word is even less useful. When I inherited the (much smaller) predecessors to these manuals several years back, they were already too complex for Word to handle. Both the newest OS X and XP versions still misprint auto-numbered items, display TIFFs inconsistently between the screen and PDF, and do not import boilerplate text properly. Auto-numbers preceding steps in a protocol are also unstable if the steps are on more than one page.
Adobe should remember that many science departments have a significant financial investment in Macs already. These same departments are where future technical writers are trained. Not having an OS X native version will limit Adobe's exposure to future customers (in both operating systems).

I am using FrameMaker Version-7. I found in equations, "=" and "+" not aligned vertically to "-" and horizontal line (dividing numerator and denominator). Version-3 does not have this problem. Don't know about Version-7.1.

Cyrillic character support. I manage a documentation suite that we translate into Russian, among other languages. I just got Frame, and I am still trying to figure out how to make this work. Please stop making things so difficult and let Frame recognize Cyrillic characters, otherwise I will have to keep those documents in Word, which defeats the whole purpose of getting Frame.