Acrobat 9 with FrameMaker 7.2

[J_D_W]

Hello,

I'm running FrameMaker 7.2p158, Acrobat 7.1.0, and Windows XP, everything patched up to date.

I've recently acquired the latest version of the Technical Communication Suite, which includes Acrobat 9. I'm not ready to install FM8 yet, but I would like to play with Acrobat 9.

Does anyone have any experiences or caveats they'd like to share about running FrameMaker 7.2 in conjunction with Acrobat 9? I'd very much appreciate any insight that anyone may have.

Thanks,

Jon

[Art Campbell]

Well, this may not be exactly what you're looking for, but it works fine.

Also, you should know/remember that you can have multiple versions of FM on the same system without a conflict. I'm running three at the moment; again, no problems.

Art

[J_D_W]

Thanks for the info Art. I was holding off on installing FrameMaker 8 because I forgot that one could have concurrent multiple copies of FrameMaker.

Jon

[R__VanDyke]

Jon:

Does anyone have any experiences or caveats they'd like to share about running FrameMaker 7.2 in conjunction with Acrobat 9?

I'm using A'9 with both FrameMaker 7.2 and FrameMaker 8. After I got A'9 installed properly it works well enough.

That is to say that it's the Acrobat 9 installer itself that seems to present the greatest number of problems...

Cheers & hope this helps,
Riley

[J_D_W]

Riley,

Thanks for your advice. Any particular aspect with the installation that you had problems with?

I remember once installing an update to Acrobat 7 and FrameMaker losing the location of my distiller settings took ages to fix. I'm certainly hoping to avoid that kind of malarkey.

Jon

[R__VanDyke]

Jon:

Any particular aspect with the installation that you had problems with?

Gee -- I wish I did know how to make A'9 install cleanly. If I did, I'd offer that knowledge as a consulting service.

That is to say that recently all four writers who tried to install it at one customer location had problems getting the A'9 to work properly after installation -- and each person's problems were all slightly different.

And, alas, so too were the responses to those problems offered by Adobe support. In one case A'Support recommended running a cleanup tool, in one case it insisted that the program should install with the same serial number as the Tech Comm Suite that putatively includes A'9 (it never did), and in another case it "punted" and gave the I.T. folks a new, separate serial number to circumvent the otherwise unresolvable installation problems.

In my admittedly subjective opinion, the central problem since Acrobat 7 or so is that the Acrobat installation programs have been so overloaded with processes intended to prevent copied or pirated installation that they've instead become impenetrable barriers to legitimate installation...

Cheers & hope this helps,
Riley