Download of older FrameMaker versions?

[AngeloBurton]

Dear Forum-users,

I'd like to know if there is a Download page for trials of older FrameMaker version. I'm looking for version 7.2 in particular because a customer wants us to work with this version. Working with higher versions from our side proofed to be difficult.

Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you very much in advance.

Kind regards

AngeloBurton

[Van Kurtz]

Angelo,

I doubt you can download an older version from Adobe.

Using FrameMaker 9, you can save your files as mif version 7, which can be read by FrameMaker 7.2. Make sure you do not use any version 9 features that are not in version 7.

Van

[Art_Campbell]

Well, no, you can't. There isn't any reason to provide trial downloads of obsolete products. ;- )

You can download a bug-fix version of 8, or a trial version of 9.

But as Van suggests, if your client is locked into verion 7.x, your only option is to SaveAs from 9 to 7 MIF. You could probably also SaveAs RTF and open that in FM 7, but you'd lose a lot of FM data.

Art

[anitam1405587]

Actually yes there is, because sometimes there are files that are much older than patches will allow for import. I run into this all the time in the aerospace industry.

[Bob_Niland]

re: …SaveAs from 9 to 7 MIF.

That would be expected to handle FM internal character set usage and special characters, but…

It back-crosses the Unicode boundary (FM8+). If the user content in the documents contains any text with code points above the 8-bit 00h_to_FFh range, i.e. Unicode U+0100_to_U+FFFF, it's hard to say how that is handled; easily not elegantly.

[Michael_Müller-Hillebrand]

After hearing of similar issues for documentation service providers and discussions with representatives of Adobe Germany the following solution was found: You have to buy the current version of FrameMaker but NOT as a box product but rather through the Adobe TLP licensing program

http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/volumelicensing/

Next, via Adobe Customer Service you should be able to downgrade the license, i.e. they provide you with a serial number. You have to get the original installer yourself, but this should not be a problem.

In April 2009 I summarized this in a blog post (German only) and some people reported that they had success. It may be worthwhile if you check with Adobe Customer Service first.

http://cap-studio.de/wp/index.php/2009/04/aeltere-framemaker-lizenzen-erwerben/

- Michael

[StudioSm]

You might want to keep an eye on Ebay. Old software can often be bought quite cheap.

[StudioSm]

Actually there is both a version 6 and a version 7.2 on Ebay right now.