From FrameMaker Product Management

a) can't figure out how to reply to Mike outside the forum, so apologies for muddling the clarity of the wishlist

b) Mike, from what I've understood of your "overlapping styles" problem, perhaps you could sidestep it with a different approach. The clue, to me, is that you say "assign a different character tag to the whole sentence". In the specific example (Note) you mention, I can envisage having a :note paragraph style and a !fish character style. If you prefer to have your notes in the context of a larger paragraph, perhaps you could play with the run-in properties to have a single visual block built up with three FM paragraphs.

HTH

Hi, Aseem,

Here are my top feature requests for FrameMaker 8.x or 9. All of these features would be useful both for unstructured and structured users.

1. COLOR MANAGEMENT: Tie in to the Adobe Color Engine. No more GDI in Windows! No more being stuck with EPS graphics for safety.

2. NEW ANCHORED FRAME POSITION - CENTER OF PAGE: I use the two-cell table method for placing graphics and captions. The graphic is in
the top cell and the caption in the bottom cell. It works great in-column, but sometimes I'd like to place a 1-column wide graphic and caption in the middle of a 2-column page, so that the anchored frame partially overlaps each of the two columns. And I want the text in each column to run around the anchored frame. The closest I've been able to achieve is to draw a text box in the center of the page, and place the table inside. It looks great, and runaround works as desired, but since the text frame is disconnected from the main flow, the figure numbering doesn't increment properly.

3. GRAMMAR CHECKER: If FrameMaker had a grammar checker, I'd probably never use Microsoft Word to write again.

4. <$volname> VARIABLE: Let's say you divide a book into parts-- example: "Part 3: Maintenance"-- and you want to put (as is common) "Part 3: Maintenance" in the page headers of the chapters in Part 3. The <$volnum> works great for carrying forward the "Part #" of a book to following chapters, but I know of no easy way to have the Part Title ripple forward to appropriate chapters. A <$volname> variable would do that. (I know each part name could be assigned as a variable, but then I'd need a different set of master pages for each part title.)

5. OVERLAPPING CHARACTER STYLES: I write books about aquariums. If I assign a character tag to the scientific name of a fish, to italicize it, and then assign a different character tag, such as "Note" to the whole sentence, the ScientificName character tag disappears.

6. OPTICAL MARGIN ALIGNMENT: To allow hanging punctuation like InDesign. It would greatly improve the appearance of type. Heck, I'd love to see FrameMaker use the same type engine as InDesign!

7. LAYERS PALETTE: Sometimes, objects get hidden behind other objects, or aren't visible (such as white text against white background). It would be nice to have a layers palette that shows the objects on the current page. It would be easy to notice invisible items, or duplicate copies of graphics hiding behind each other.

8. INHERITED STYLES: Like InDesign, it would be nice to have "based on" styles. For example, changing the typeface used for a paragraph with Heading1 style, would also change the typeface in Heading2, Heading3, and other styles based on it. No more changing each separately.

9. DIFFERENT FILL & STROKE COLORS FOR OBJECTS: Make it work like the other Adobe products. Currently, to draw a black box with red
outline in FrameMaker, it's necessary to draw two boxes of different color, make one smaller, and put it on top of the other. The controls for setting fill and stroke colors are already there, they just don't let you specify different values!

10. OPENTYPE FEATURE SUPPORT: Ligatures, alternate characters, old style figures, and the works. Like InDesign.

Mike Wickham

P.S. About me: I'm a one-person company, laying out graphically rich, unstructured books.

First and foremost, I'd like to see a Mac version of FrameMaker. It is ridiculous that a company the size of Adobe cannot put this together.

Second, full support of OpenType fonts, not the halfway support we've now got.

And I'd like a real work area that shows bleeds, i.e., shows when a graphic extends off the page.

Hi:

I'm a senior technical writer who operates primarily as a consultant and contractor. I've been using FrameMaker more or less full-time since 1998, and invariably suggest to my new clients that they acquire FrameMaker as the first step towards "professionalizing" their documentation sets.

I first want to state that I appreciate the explicit intent of this forum in general and the specific opportunity offered this particular ...prioritized list thread. But...

Having waited almost nine years for any truly substantive progress in FrameMaker, I want more than anything to see the product architecture provide greater support for user-created add-ons and utilities. The corollary of that desire is that Adobe actively encourage and support that hypothetical add-on community.

The model I have in my mind is primarily (but not limited to) that of the Mozilla Firefox browser or Thunderbird email client. Both of these products' baseline levels of usability and functionality can be highly customized and greatly enhanced with a staggering variety of sometimes astonishingly creative user-developed add-ons (nee extensions).

As I said earlier, I appreciate the opportunity to share my thoughts with FrameMaker Product Management. But at the same time, I've become less credulous that the mid-twentieth-century's top down, closed-source, "big new release" model of command-economy product development can provide the best value or most agile response to twenty-first century customers.

As such, my number one desire is to see FrameMaker become a product that's no longer imprisoned by the need to repeatedly petition a figurative Product Politburo for each relatively small addition to basic product functionality.

So, and to reiterate, I want more than anything to see the product architecture provide greater support for user-created add-ons and utilities. The corollary of that desire is that Adobe actively encourage and support the hypothetical add-on community.

Cheers & thanks for the opportunity to respond,
Riley

At the moment, I have just one wish for the future of FrameMaker:

Adobe, please bring FrameMaker back to the Macintosh-platform.

I am still hoping ....

Jörg

IMHO a very well received FrameMaker upgrade package would present changes in three areas:

* Include a benefit for all users; my best idea so far is direct PDF output with full CMYK and spot color support. This touches current FrameMaker internals only partly and is a feature one can expect from Adobe. And it would give FrameMaker a competitive edge compared to Word and others.

* Improve the experience for XML users; I have many ideas here, especially regarding the editing experience for users. E.g. the number of clicks to set attributes is too high at the moment.

* Fix some long-time annoying things; this would be bug-fixes of course (long lists available) and a well-crafted UI overhaul (not a complete switch to the Photoshop style).

Even though I am mainly a structure and template developer, I am well aware that most users aren't. And that's the reason I don't ask for improvements for developers (e.g. like merging r/w rules into XSL post/pre-processing; like being able to control cell formatting via the EDD; like...).

- Michael Müller-Hillebrand

My wish-list for structured Frame:

1. A code view! "View Element Boundaries etc" SO does not do it for me. I want to be able to switch back and forth between WYSIWYG and code the way I do when I'm building websites. Why this simple little feature wasn't included in an xml-authoring tool is a total mystery to me. I feel as though I'm working with one eye patched.

2. In the less-obvious category of requests: I would like a "for Dummies" way to build my own EDD from scratch, by selecting from a series of ready-made, building-block, elements. I got started in structured Frame by jumping right in with the DITA App Pack. I am fairly experienced with Frame, xml and css, and found DITA quite intuitive. However, I have no SGML or programming experience and the 200+ pages of sample EDD just about ground me to dust. It's working well enough for me now, but I still wince every time I touch it. I would much prefer to build it from the ground up, adding element definitions as I need them, than to chip away parts I don't want, crossing my fingers that the whole EDDifice doesn't come crashing down.

Karen

My wishlist:

1. A PostScript/PDF engine that is independent from the crappy Windows GDI, allowing to create PDFs with CMYK/spot colors directly... similar to InDesign etc.

2. A PostScript/PDF engine...

3. Support for right-to-left languages (Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew), including typographic features (kashidas etc.)

4. Customizable shortcuts as in Illustrator, InDesign etc.

5. A Mac OSX version. I've crossgraded all my old Mac licenses meanwhile, but I would even buy new (!) Mac licenses if available.

Regards,

Bernd Meissner (FM user since version 3)
http://www.meissner-dokuteam.de

Hello Mr. Dokania,

I think it's a great idea to ask the people using FrameMaker every day. Here is my wish list:
1. Cascading formatting styles. This would facilitate the creation of formatted documents.
2. EDD-Palette for working in a structured document, much like the editing view in InDesign.
3. Palette for linked graphics to easily replace or navigate to a specific graphic.
4. Layers e.g. for multiple text input in one document.
5. True color management.
6. Display options for graphics (lowres/highres), which can be set or each graphic individually.

May I add that I switched to recommend a combination of Word and InDesign to my customers as I am still very disappointed about the discontinuation of FM on the Macintosh platform.