Seeking inputs on desired features in FrameMaker

Hi everyone. I am going to have 2 posts. The first is my list of the bugs that drive me nuts and that I spend far too much time dealing with. I am still using FM9, but I highly doubt these issues have been fixed...unless someone can tell me otherwise. I read through all the other requests and suggestions and as far as I could see no one else mentioned these:

1. Conditonal Text, when you press enter the conditional text is not saved on the hard return.When we bought FM9, this became a problem. I did submit a bug a long time ago. Basically, when you are in the middle of a section of already conditionalized text, and then add something and press enter, the hard return does not retain the conditional text. This is a huge pain because we have many different products and once you have set up a paragraph to have X and Y conditional text, I want the hard return to keep that same conditional text.

2. Probably related to the GUI usability issues, but I have huge problems with FM9 crashing when I click a tab/pod in some mysterious wrong order. I have not even found the pattern for this, but essentially, I might have a bunch of documents open, and I realize I need to apply conditional text. Then I click the pod and the 'Framemaker has detected a serious error and must close' message comes up. And of course all the open files are closed and locked and I often have to go hunting for those files again because when I reopen FM it does not recover/open the files that were open.

3. I want a STOP button. We have lots of text insets over a network and sometimes there is absolutely no way to know if FM has stopped working or if it is just taking a long time. The only way to stop this is to close FM. It would be fabulous to be able to stop an update or stop a process, especially when you cannot tell what is going on in the background. Perhaps a progress log, a progess bar or anything to help with this.

4. Text insets - Cannot start a text inset with a header paragraph font, for example. When you update the text inset this header tag is appended to the end, creating an empty paragraph tag, when when we conver to HTML brings up empty pages...I have to manually go through every single page of every document when we are preparing for a release to hunt for these extra hard returns, and I have to do fancy things (like add a body text tag at the beginning of a text inset) to make it work temporarily until we 'flatten' the text insets. Again, some kind of clean up program would be an option.

5. Text insets bleed into the cross reference markers and make them disappear or remove them entirely. If you don't add a hard return at the end of a text inset, it hooks onto/bleeds into the heading on the next page, and if there is a cross reference marker there, it can easily be lost. I have another fancy fix for this. I have to manually cut and paste the marker and move it in from the margin onto the text so that it doesn't get lost or deleted with the text inset before it.

6. Save as PDF - super duper problems with this trying to prepare for print. I have finally figured out the recent issue that crashed my system over and over. I had to copy all my files to my hard drive and create a non network login. The problem seemed to be related to the roaming profile that was searching for my job options in different places (I guess).

7. Much much more control over all the format importing and searching and updating....when I import a new set of paragraph formats, for example, I should be able to replace all the old ones, and not retain unused styles. You have to manually go into every document to remove the ones that are not used anymore, and thus to make sure that people do not use these in error (problematic for html conversion for example). I would like to be able to search for and remove these unwanted/unused formats in a much more controlled way.

8. Book in a book bug. I have set up books within books to enable quick and easy navigation. This is fine by itself, but I have discovered that if that book is open at the same time as a standard book with documents, and I do an update, it opens EVERY SINGLE BOOK in the book within book file, and then because we are on a network, it basically freezes everything because it is trying to open all the cross references, all the text insets, everywhere....and then I cannot stop this process and then I have to go to every single folder to delete the locked file that has now been created by this book in a book ....

9. I also concur with the complaints about the document prompting to save because it thinks there were changes, when all that happened was you opened it. Along these lines, it would be nice to be able to skip messages like this, for example, if I am updating styles across 200 documents, I don't want to have to click OK every time I am asked if it is okay to save/history etc. I cannot leave my computer when I do a global thing like this because it is waiting for me to click ok for every document.

10. I also would like the popular plugins put into FM, like the Silicon Prairie paragraph tools. But this is for the next post where I list the feature requests!

you can reach me at amandawood@comsol.com

Hi Kapil,

Nice talking with you and Tom at CMS/DITA North America!

Lots of great suggestions and requests here. I have only three:

• Please, please, please buy IXGen from Frank Stearns and incorporate it into FrameMaker, as John Sgammato and others have so wisely suggested.
• Please buy Enhance for FrameMaker from Sandy Brook Software and incorporate it into FrameMaker to add an outline view, a la Microsoft Word.
• Please fix the "phantom table" problem once and for all. If a table spans several pages, FrameMaker (yes, even version 10) sometimes makes a duplicate of it, but you cannot edit the "ghost" image of the table. You can tell this happens if the document's page count suddenly increases unexpectedly. The only solution is to highlight the real table, press CTRL-X (cut), and paste it back into the document again.

Thank you for asking,

Lance

Some suggestions for improvement of FrameMaker

1. The Find/Change dialogue box is both too small & the displayed characters

are too indistinct to pick up errors e.g. if you type "Cornfield" it should

ALWAYS be clearly distinguishable from "Comfield"

The quotation marks are not uniformly displayed. I know one can change the

windows setting, but this fix changes everything. Perhaps a special 16 pt.

fixed pitch serif font might work.

1. New Feature: It would be useful to have guides which "grow" from the top

or side as in Photoshop.

1. A fuller explanation of errors, e.g. "FrameMaker has encountered a

problem and needs to close" is not good enough. What do the numbers mean?

1. New Feature: The ability to generate a flight of endnotes

1. <cntrl> L does not always work. Footnote separator line sometimes

appears, sometimes not.

1. Frame needs better page logic, footnotes should be able to break and not

<sometimes> appear on the page following the footnote call. The easiest fix

would be the ability to have several footnotes on the same line. Thus

'                             1 Ibid                            2 Ibid

3Shell, "Suggestions".

1. The color selection dropdown list is very slippery. If one has somehow

imported many colors it is very hard to isolate colors which are redundant.

The cursor skids to top or bottom.

1. The paragraph format dialogue is sometimes shy about appearing. The Para

designer is probably the most used (for me anyway) and any stability issues

here are disconcerting.

8 The dialogue boxes in the advanced <T> screen of the para designer does

not sort it's call topics

If you have many call topics it's a pain to find one. Instead they are

listed in order of placement. Thus, if you have a picture of a zoo which you

use often and placed first. Zoo remains at the top of the list.

1. New feature: a preflight test run for books or long documents. It's not

useful that on printing page 1,000 I am told there is an error, or no

1. PageMaker did this very well.

10 New feature: FrameMaker should be able to make use of multiprocessors.

1. The multiple screen display is also poor when using a dialogue display

which stretches across both screens.

1. Get rid of the "The font has changed" message. It hasn't, it won't.

Rob Shell

Windows Seven

FrameMaker 9 patched

4 GB RAM

3 TB hd

My current system is FrameMaker 8, so forgive me if I suggest something that is already in 10.

1. H - Outline view, with expandable/collapsable/hierarchical outline view of headings only. It should have the ability to move, promote, demote or copy entire sections (including any collapsed/invisible headings/subsections, but not including any expanded/visible subsections) by moving, promoting, demoting, or copying the heading. Outline levels should be linkable to paragraph styles, with the ability to assign more than one paragraph style to the same outline level. Outline view would probably need to show all conditions, for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the fact that Conditional Text markers often get plastered onto the fronts of subsequent headings when you hide a conditional section. As FrameMaker is designed for long documents, I have been continually disappointed and amazed that (for over 20 years now) FrameMaker doesn’t have an outline view. (And before you tell me to try Structured FrameMaker, I’ve tried it. The Structure view isn’t even remotely close to an outliner.) In my opinion an outliner is one of the most useful and powerful authoring tools ever invented, and is the last major critical feature that FrameMaker doesn’t have.

2. H - For conversion of a document and its hotlinks to PDF, add support for the "matrix" and "popup" commands in hypertext markers. These don’t currently make it through to the PDF. The matrix implementation would probably be straightforward. But for the "pop-up" implementation I don’t even know if the current PDF format can handle links in the form of popup menus; perhaps someone can enlighten me. The matrix command is extremely useful for making self-maintaining navigational buttons on master pages, because the matrix hypertext commands come from a text flow on a Reference page, which in turn can come from auto-updated cross-references which echo chapter numbers and such, or from an alternative imported Reference page. When I started to distribute my 60-manual set of books in PDF format (previously distributed in FrameViewer format) I had to replace a set of self-maintaining matrix buttons with hardcoded gotolink buttons that are labour-intensive to maintain. If I could use matrix buttons again (even a simple 1x1 matrix that consists of one cell) it would save a lot of time in my document finishing procedure, and reduce the potential for error.

3. H - Macro recording and playback, integrated with scripting. It has to be dependable. I do my writing in Windows FM8, and my semi-automated document finishing procedure in UNIX FM8 because of its macro and fmbatch scripting capabilities. Now that Windows FM 10 has scripting I have the opportunity to replicate my UNIX scripts on Windows (and be ready for when my UNIX box eventually dies), but I am dreading the migration. After hearing about problems with moving the focus between the document window and pop-ups (and rather crucially back into the document window) on Windows I am fearful that the automation will simply stop or abort at some point. On UNIX I can type a single command (which in turn launches a series of unattended fmbatch commands) and come back 8 hours later to a collection of 60 large PDF files. I don’t want to replace that command with a two-week interactive waste of time, so the macro and scripting playback on Windows will have to be rock solid, like it is on UNIX.

4. M - In the File menu, make the list of recently opened files longer. In FM8 it holds 5, when I need about 50. And the filename should be followed by the name of the parent folder. Like many managers of very large manual suites, I use the same standard names for many files (manIX.fm, etc.) in order to standardise my stylesheet’s navigation buttons, and the files reside in different directories. In the File menu listing I can’t tell them apart.

5. M - Fix the "None" cursor blink rate bug. You know, the one that makes FrameMaker freeze at 60 minutes (or the autosave time, whichever is sooner) if you set the cursor blink rate to "None" in the Windows keyboard settings. Putting aside the questionable logic of designing a visible insertion point indicator that is in fact invisible 50% of the time, I work fast, and when my eyes are flitting quickly between three screens and umpteen windows thousands of times a day, half a second is a long time to wait for the cursor to show up just to see where I’ve left it. All the little delays add up to one big annoyance and it slows me down. Making it blink faster just adds to the animation noise that I try to keep to a minimum so I can concentrate on my work. Have you ever tried reading a book while a friend flicks their fingers at your face? Distracting isn’t it? Would it really be so hard to make the cursor just sit still quietly with a solid user-defined colour and thickness so we can still see it without all the hyperactivity?

6. L - Add the ability to interrogate the properties of a highlighted character to see exactly what it is (Unicode slot number and UTF-8 slot number). Many a time I have tried to tell the difference between different characters that look identical (quotes, rings, certain English and Russian characters, etc.), and I end up entering a hex code guess into the Find facility just to see if it can find the character that I’m looking at.

7. L - Add the ability for ordinary international power users to see and use FrameMaker’s existing Asian language features (menu option Format > Document > Combined Fonts). This feature exists - why hide it? Many of us work on global documents nowadays. We shouldn’t have to use a localised operating system or hack the AsianFonts parameter in the $FMHOME/fminit/configui/cmds.cfg file just to get the menu option to show up in the interface. I gave this a Low priority because I already have a workaround - I hacked the cmds.cfg file myself because I needed to produce some Chinese documents on my English system.

8. L - Add a paragraph attribute for right-indenting the Last line of a paragraph independently of the paragraphs’s general right-indent. This could be similar to the "First" line left-indent capability, but would work as a right-indent on the last line. This would be useful for entries in the TOC so that the page number area on the right-hand side doesn’t get cluttered up with the preceding text, for entries that are more than one line long. I gave this a low priority because I can get similar behaviour by using certain insane values for Word Spacing in the Advanced paragraph attributes, but it feels risky to do it this way and is not as reliable as a dedicated feature would be.

9.-10. Reserved for some other major forgotten issues that are sure to come to me a few seconds after I submit this.

Thanks for collecting all this feedback.

It increases my respect and future hope for the product, even if not all of my ideas get implemented.

Unless of course you ignore the request for the outliner. ;-)

Email address: dhayes at geotrace dot com

1. FrameMaker should be converted into a true XML authoring environment. There should be no structured or unstructured frameamerk. There should just be FrameMaker, which has XML files. When I upgrade to the latest version of FrameMaker, all my binary files should be converted into XML documents. You should publish a XSD that defines the XML doc structure and leverage the existing XSLT engine, so that out of the box any FrameMaker book can be converted into any publishing format the user would care to. And also allow the user to design their own XSLTS to convert into some other format that people haven't even thought of yet. That way I can truly single source all my content in FrameMaker instead of having to use the buggy Framemaker to Robohelp integration.
2. In addition, provide a GUI that allows me to design a template and structure (similar to structured framemaker ) that allows me to perform schema validation of the structure and enforces controls on what the template may contain. Basically, this would just be a port of EDD more or less.
3. Provide extensible framework for content management and SCM modules so anyone can plug in their favorite tool (mines SVN) and have framemaker's GUI natively support that so i can check in, check outs, get revision histories etc. If I can't get that, I'd settle for native SVN and GIT integration.
4. allow me to assign my own hot keys to whatever action i want to take just like i can in robohelp. For example, I would love if control+b could be assigned to  a CHARACTER FORMAT that bolded text instead of being a character format override.
5. Improve the atrocious documentation for extendscript.
6. Allow the find and delete mechanism to find any type of format and delete it (e.g paragraph format, character format etc) across an entire or book of books. Also, allow me to indicate whether i want to delete only if its unused.
7. Greatly improved grep/regex support in the Find method

I appreciate the opportunity.

I am a very new user of TCS3.5 and FrameMake 10 in particular. We are moving from an unstructured authoring with Microsoft Office tools to structured authoring with FrameMaker /RoboHelp. We decided on TCS3.5 because we believe the suite will provide overall best set tools to move us in the right direction of structured authoring despite our apprehensive of a steep learning curve from where are coming from. Regardless of our authoring methods, we write a lot of user manuals and I am disappointed with the usability of FrameMaker's user guide. I currently don't have enough experience with FrameMaker to request too many improvements but below is what I would like to see:

1. H = Better user guide with more detailed information and troubeshooting, especially for newer features like SharePoint connector. It seems some of the content of the user guide is written with the assumption that people are already familiar with FrameMaker and, as a result, leave out good information that could be taken for granted in that context that newcomers will be completely at a loss. And before anyone offfer the suggestions, the Adobe TV videos are wonderful but they offer tantalizing views of information that do not clearly or fully answer my questions.

2. H = Better and easier conversion and from unstructured and very popular document editing tools (i.e. Microsoft Office).

3. H = Better workspace to use as an XML editor with DITA and other popular standards validation, without the style template overlay. Using Notepad (or other configured editor) is ok to look at XML code, but I would prefer the fuctionality to be in one tool if possible. In my limited experience, XMetal does a credible job in that type of workspace, and copy and past from Word to XMetal with DITA is much easier than with FrameMaker. This feature may be simply  a user preference but I like my tags on when coding, I even have my show/hide on when I write in Word for a similar reason.

4. H = Maybe I am just missing the instructions, a drag and drop feature for building DITA maps would very useful.

5. M = Direct to EPub would be nice too.

Well, that is all for now. I am sure I will run into more challenges as I learn to use FrameMaker/RoboHelp while converting our legacy documentation and I will post accordingly.

1. H: Format report list
2. H: Frame Anchoring Position: "Above Current Line"
3. H: Cross-Reference format of
   Definition: [ <$markertext> ]
4. M: Master pages of varying sizes, including
   Height: [ Unlimited ]
   Conditional master pages for extra credit.
5. M: Pass SVG through as vector to HTML and XML.
6. L: Real endnotes.
7. - 10. <reserved for future use>

Please, please, please 1) DO NOT ADD ANY NEW FEATURES UNTIL YOU HAVE REMOVED AND PATCHED ALL OF THE BUGS THAT CURRENTLY EXITS!!!! 2) Write useable and useful user documentation. What you have now is not intuitive, not informative, and lacking in meaningful procedural steps. It contains a lot of "what you can do with Framemaker" but hardly any concentrated useful instruction sets for how to do anything.  I still refer to to my old hard copy Framemaker 7 user guide because it is well written and useful.

Framemaker, as well as Adober products and documentation in general, used to be top-of-the-line. No more. I've been a user since before Framemaker was purchased by Adobe, and a Robohelp user since the mid-1990s. The quality, predictability, and useability of both of these products has deteriotated in the past few years. I am very disappointed in Adobe.

Please take the time to make the necessary repairs from the groiund up; then feel free to add new features after the product has returned to the high-quality I need to get my work done.

Wouldn't you know it, I just thought of another one.

12. (M) I'd like to be able to change the default marker color. More than once, I have deleted text and accidentally deleted an unnoticed marker in it. If the marker color was different than the text, it would stand out more and help prevent this error.

I know I already submitted 10 suggestions, but I thought of one more important one:

11. (H- very high) I would like the built-in ability to create forms with form fields that will carry over to PDF.