[Closed] FrameMaker 7.x/8 Feature Requests

Report · Aug 19, 2002

Time to start entering these. If you are unsure about whether FM has the feature yet, please do some research and figure it out before posting.

Please don't post requests for assistance in here, either.

Cheers,

Sean

Report · Jan 16, 2004

FrameMaker 7.1 for Mac OS X not supported???

This is my last straw with Adobe... I've purchased (personally and professionally), used, supported, and promoted a large variety of Adobe products since 1993 and been a big proponent of the company through the good and bad years. Products include:

Adobe Photoshop 3 for SGI
Adobe Photoshop 3 for Sun
Adobe Photoshop 3 for Mac
Adobe Photoshop 5.5 for Mac
Adobe Photoshop 7 for Mac OS X

Adobe Illustrator 5.5 for SGI
Adobe Illustrator 5.5 for Sun
Adobe Illustrator 5.5 for Mac
Adobe Illustrator 8 for Mac
Adobe Illustrator 10 for Mac OS X

Adobe Premiere 4.2 for SGI
Adobe Premiere 4.2 for Mac

In addition I've purchased (personally and professionally), used and promoted GoLive products pre and post Adobe acquisition

GoLive Cyberstudio 3 Mac
Adobe GoLive 4 Mac

In addition I've purchased (personally and professionally), used, supported and promoted FrameMaker products pre and post Adobe acquisition

FrameTech FrameMaker 4 for SGI
FrameTech FrameMaker 5 for SGI
FrameTech FrameMaker 5 for Mac
Adobe FrameMaker 5.5 for SGI
Adobe FrameMaker 5.5 for Mac
Adobe FrameMaker 6 for Sun

In many cases (professionally) large quantities of licenses were purchased. After watching what occurred with Premiere (instability, bugs, etc), Cyberstudio (lack of interest, support, etc) and now with FrameMaker (no Mac OS X UNIX version??? Linux Version??? - FrameMaker started on UNIX!), I realized that Adobe has lost touch with its "loyal" customers. Especially, today with very comparable products available through opensource (Gimp, Cinepaint, LaTex, Scribus, etc) and commercial (Dreamweaver, Freehand, Flash, QuarkXpress, etc). Until Adobe changes it attitudes and practices, I will NEVER purchase, promote, or recommend an Adobe product again (personally or professionally)

Report · Jan 18, 2004

I agree David. No purchase of Adobe products until something changes.

Report · Jan 29, 2004

We have no alternative to FM... May be Adobe can sell FM to Macromedia? ;o)

Report · Feb 04, 2004

That actually sounds like it would be a good fit. Clearly, Framemaker seems like a product that no longer fits Adobe's portfolio of products. Macromedia has always been more interested in "e-learning" (see Authorware). With their recent pruchase of e-help, itseems like Framemaker would be a nice fit to have a complete suite of products targeted to the Techical Writer/Educator.

Report · Feb 04, 2004

I support CAD systems for roughly 150 chip design engineers in a small division of a Fortune 100 company. We are currently converting our entire computing environment of over 500 systems from Solaris to Linux. The lack of a Linux-friendly version of your product is giving us a tremendous headache.

We respectfully request that Adobe either resurrect the Linux version of FM, or that Adobe work with Codeweavers, Inc. (http://www.codeweavers.com ) to make the Windows version 100% operational under their "Crossover Office" product.

Our decision will influence the bigger divisions of our corporation with a couple thousand engineers each since our conversion is ahead of the theirs.

PLEASE DON'T FORCE US TO THE DARK SIDE ... M$-Word/M$-Visio is not our
friend.

Report · Feb 05, 2004

LBrock, (couldn't find an email address to you)

Noone at Adobe reads your comments here. This is a user-to-user forum.

Please use the normal communications channels to Adobe to make
your point. Adobe needs to know, at an executive level, that
they are losing customers and many licenses due to their
(lack of) platform strategy. In the forum, noone will hear you scream.

--
/Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
Technical Communicator, Uppsala, Sweden
http://go.to/framers/

Report · Feb 06, 2004

Adobe does glance at these forums on occasion. Raising your voice here (and through other channels) does not hurt.

Unfortunately, I still feel Adobe has ditched FM on the Mac side of the world.

The one and only feature request I have is that FM runs on OSX. I could care less about any other changes. OSX is the operating system on the Mac, not classic.

OSX.

Report · Feb 13, 2004

1. Drag-sizing capability for resizing tables and table cells. The current method is an enormous pain in the butt.

2. In Find/Change utility, the same selections on the 'change' side as on the 'find' size. The lack of being able to mass-change tags is another enormous pain.

3. In the TOC tags, end the separation between the "HeadingTOC" tags and the reference page specifications. Make it possible to change both in one operation.

Report · Feb 13, 2004

Keith:
1) You can, unless we're thinking along different lines.
3) Building blocks have always been where they are, and will probably remain there. But for overall look, like font, tab positions, and so on, they are connected.

Report · Feb 15, 2004

native FrameMaker for MacOS X -- even a carbonized version (as with Acrobat 5) would be immensely helpful....will need classic no more, and will run much much much faster

Report · Feb 17, 2004

1. OS X version (Carbon or Cocoa, none of this Classic stuff ... it is the only 9-app I use)
2. Full Unicode support

Report · Feb 17, 2004

OS X version native please! I don't want to use Virtual PC on my Macs.

Report · Feb 17, 2004

Mac folks, I recommend you write a letter to Adobe directly. Electronic pleas (e-mail, etc.) are cheap and, in here, probably unnoticed.

Cheers,

Sean

Report · Feb 19, 2004

My request is a very simple one:

The ability to specify different Fill and Stroke colours for the same object.

Now that's basic!!!

Report · Mar 09, 2004

What I'd like to see in FrameMaker is:
From the Book file, I would like to be able to right-click and mark a file that needs information or other resolution (e.g., as red text) and be able to add a comment stating what the need is.

Report · Mar 09, 2004

Lisa:

It's certainly not a complete solution, but in the FrameMaker book window, ALT-click on a document file, then choose "File Info".

The text entry areas in the File Info dialog box correspond to the "Document Properties" fields in a PDF of the FrameMaker book. One or more of the "File Info" text entry areas may allow you to annotate the file...(?)

Cheers & hope this helps,
Riley

Report · Mar 11, 2004

I realize this is somewhat late but here is my request:

Could we get an option in indexing so that I could sort by text or numbers. As it is right now we use Frame for creating our parts manuals. We use empty index markers in front of all part numbers so that when a part number changes in text you don't need to make sure you change the text in the marker. Most of our numbers are 7 digits long but on occasion we do have 8, 9 and 10 digit numbers. Now the index gets sorted like text with the longer numbers being sorted in with the shorter numbers. I hate referring to Word but at least I have an option in Word. The only way I know of to get this to sort correctly is to put a specific sort order into the markers for all of the 7 digit numbers. I don't want to have to do that because of the chance that the number in the marker won't get changed in an update.

Maybe I am just asking for the world!!!

Chris

Report · Mar 11, 2004

Chris,

I agree that having a numeric/alpha switch would make index creation a
lot easier.

In the interim to make your maintenance easier, you could create (or
have one created for you) a Framescript to update your existing
markers with the proper sort order sequence. This would be a one-time
effort, and then adding new part numbers with the proper sort sequence
and creating the index should be less of a problem.

Report · Mar 16, 2004

Probably not high on anyone's list (not even foremost on mine), but useful I think:

The abilty to either (a) open more than one Find/Replace dialog box instance, or (b) the dividsion of Find/Replace into a pure Text tool and a "special" Find/Replace tool used to find paragraph tags, unresolved cross-references, etc.

Why I want this: I inherit a lot of messy FM projects that require me to repair and resolve many horribly broken x-refs, condition tags, etc. I've found one quick way to track down the x-ref targets is to search for an unresolved x-ref, identify its text, then search for that text in the book.

Doing this means I'm constantly using the current Find / Replace tool's finicky drop-down list to select back-and-forth from text to x-ref. This consumes an excessive amount of cycles. Separating the functions, or at least being able to open two instances of Find / Replace, would help.

Note that this particular request is just another addition to my general request for several Find / Replace updates. I've previously submitted posts for a true Regular Expression F/R capability, "hyper search" which captures all occurences in a single window, and a U.I. update.

Cheers & thanks,
Riley

Report · Mar 21, 2004

> Perhaps this approach could be expanded to include the ability to specify a named character style "plus n points" or "minus n points," thus allowing larger or smaller character size variations of a named character style to be specified as that style's Default Font That's been on my wish list at my Web site for a long time. It would be great for bullets (base size -1 pt or base size + 2 percent). > I, too, would like the option of Word's based-on. Even in Word it is optional. But, failing that, if you have the resource of the maker.ini at your disposal, you can change a font en mass pretty quickly. What this is all about is Style Inheritance. Whether the styles be Paragraph, Character, Page or Table Styles, style inheritance would provide a great tool for maintaining styles in a workplace. Taken to its logical conclusion, a documentation shop could have a Corporate Standard, modified via inheritance for Manuals, Reports, Press Releases, Web Documents, On-line Help, etc. Projects could have global variations that overrode the corporate standard (we're trying out a new 'look'), Books could have variations that overrode a Project, Documents/Chapters ditto (think appendices with code examples). To maintain all this you would also need a Global Style reporting/maintenance tool that would track styles -- <Global<Text>> + 2pts before + color=Red -- without which the whole concept would founder. FrameMaker currently requires us to set up each set of Styles in isolation, which adds extra time and complexity to the process, and increases the chance of mistakes.

Report · Apr 01, 2004

re: Chuck Holst 7/11/03 7:55am

Yes. I'd also like an easier way to select an individual marker from a group of adjacent markers, and to see how many there are clumped together. Of course markers should continue to be non-characters and take up zero horizontal space on the text line, but there's got to be a way to display them so that when they're adjacent they don't completely overlap each other.

Actually, maybe the best thing would be to treat them like Element Boundaries. I'd like to be able to choose between a wysiwyg mode where they take up no inline space (and thus overlap, just like we have today), and a mode where they're displayed as icons indicating their marker type. Displayed as icons, they take up space and may add pages to the document, but they never overlap. Mouse-over an icon to see the marker text as a popup... Somebody stop me before I ask for the moon.

Report · Apr 02, 2004

I would like to be able to change the path and file for an imported graphic directly through the Object Properties dialog instead of deleting the file and re-importing it.

Report · Apr 24, 2004

OSX

Report · May 03, 2004

The ability to use cursor keys to move around in tables.

Report · May 15, 2004

Wish List for FrameMaker...
1) MacOSX Native Support (if EVEN via XWindows! Can Solaris Frame be made to run via X Windows under X.3??? It doesn't have to LOOK aqua, just run under Darwin PPC!!!)
2) Linux Support (Heck, at least I could use Frame on my Mac's!)
3) Frame Vector to SVG Support (exporting/importing is horrible, taking the vector graphics in Frame and turning then into bitmaps)
4) Better PDF import support (how about turning them into a frame doc and vector graphics?)
5) Reasonable clip arp (the clip art is so dated, how about some technical art like with Visio?)
6) Better drawing (more visio-like)
7) enhanced Table support (more like Excel, some basic table formulas like summing!)
8) Better MS Word Support - I am tired of being embarassed when I export a Frame Doc to word and my output embarassing.
9) Better HTML Output - Once again, the HTML output is embarrassing.
10) Better HTML Input - How about editing HTML pages?
11) Grammer Checking Option - for all platforms