FM9 and TCS2 released

[Arnis Gubins]

For those of you glued to the inauguration today, you may have missed
Adobe's release of FM9 and the TechComm Suite 2 products. More details
are available at:

Vivek Jain's blog:
http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2009/01/adobe_technical_communication_suite_2_framemaker_9_and_roboh...

RJ Jacquez's blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/rjacquez/2009/01/new_year_new_adobe_elearning_s.html

Press release:
http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200901/012009adobeTechCom2.html

FM9 info: http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/

TCS2 info: http://www.adobe.com/products/technicalcommunicationsuite/

There's also a new e-Learning Suite of products that may be of
interest to some. See: http://www.adobe.com/products/elearningsuite/

[Russ Ward]

Inauguration? I'm glad you told me. I was glued to the FM9 release.

[_Chris_Nahr_]

There's a new blog post by Mahesh Kumar Gupta on the release of FM9...
http://blogs.adobe.com/techcomm/2009/01/adobe_framemaker_9_is_here_1.html

...which links to the following FM9 Reviewer's Guide:
https://share.acrobat.com/adc/document.do?docid=75864237-da11-4fbf-bbcc-90cda2bed045

The guide contains a much more comprehensive description of new FM9
features (including screenshots of the renovated GUI) than what I
could find elsewhere on the Adobe website, so it might be of interest.

[n42]

I wonder about this silence.
No comments. Nothing.

May be everybody here is a beta tester and has sworn to secrecy?

Did anybody test the new CMYK feature?

[_Chris_Nahr_]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2009 02:21:58 -0800, norbert_weber@adobeforums.com
wrote:

>I wonder about this silence.
>No comments. Nothing.

Well, I for one am waiting for the 9.0 upgrade to reach regular
distribution channels since Adobe's European web store is a total
rip-off...
--
http://www.kynosarges.de

[_Kenneth_Benson_]

> Did anybody test the new CMYK feature?

I ordered the upgrade, but haven't received it yet. According to Arnis,
CMYK only works with Save as PDF. Printing is still RGB. Sounds like an
improvement, but only if Save as PDF actually works this time.

--
Kenneth Benson
Pegasus Type, Inc.
www.pegtype.com

[Arnis Gubins]

Yes, CMYK (and spot colours too) works when doing the Save As PDF
(Adobe somehow manages to slip in a different postscript header that
isn't available when you manually print to the Adobe PDF printer
instance). The Save As PDF works very well when everything is
configured correctly.

However, the Save As PDF does always trigger the Generate Acrobat Data
equivalent from the print dialogue and really bloats the resulting PDF
that is intended for print production. I can't think of any reason why
an interactive PDF would need to be in CMYK rather RGB, so they kind
of got this backwards.

[n42]

>The Save As PDF works very well when everything is
>configured correctly.

Something has to be wrong with my trial installation .

Generally it's working as you said.
A tps file is created temporarily (header and content is totally different from former PScript5-files) and distilled 'correctly' after.

PROBLEM: All placed PDFs are low res RGB images.

There has to be simple solution for this problem.
I looked through maker.ini and FM9-Options but couldn't find any suspicious switch.

IRONICALLY when I check this 'convert to RGB' check box, it's no more cmyk as expected;-) BUT the placed PDFs are passed through as EPS and everything is all right with the images!

System:
Windows XP SP3
Acrobat 8 Pro
FM9 Trial

Thanks for your help
Norbert

[Arnis Gubins]

Norbert,

It sounds like you're only getting the preview image of the internally
converted PDF. I haven't had any issues like this with PDFs in FM9.
Did you also install the PDF creation add-on that came with the trial?
Did you already have an Adobe PDF printer instance in your
installation?

[Art Campbell]

Are you using the default Acrobat 9 printer instance, or your company's modified printer driver?

[n42]

You don't use a printer instance when 'save as PDF ...' is done.

[n42]

>Did you also install the PDF creation add-on that came with the trial?

First I did.
After I got this error I uninstalled Adobe Acrobat and FM9.
Then installed Acrobat 8 again and FM9 without this add-on.
Result was the same.

>Did you already have an Adobe PDF printer instance in your installation?

Yes.
May be I should have deleted it between this install- and uninstallations plague.

I'll stop digging further on and uninstall FM9 except somebody tells me exactly what happened what I have to do for a successfully installation of FM9.

Thanks
Norbert

[Arnis Gubins]

FYI, Norbert is correct. I contacted him directly and he forwarded
some samples. After extensive testing with his files and others, using
imported PDFs with the new CMYK SaveAsPDF is broken from the get go.

When using imported PDFs in FM, the CMYK SaveAsPDF option renders
these imported PDFs as low-res RGB TIFFs on output. Yuck! A major
foobar in the latest point version of this release.

HOWEVER, using EPS files works just fine! So converting the PDFs to
EPS before import is a workaround for now.

[Arnis Gubins]

Addendum: SaveAsPDF for CMYK

This option (for CMYK output) also fails to generate the Registration
& crop marks when selected (though these work fine for the RGB
version). I hadn't noticed this before, as I always add the crop &
registration in the PDFs in my workflow. Thanks to Hans Christian
Wilter for pointing this out in another thread.

For print production at this time, the current FM9p196 SaveAsPDF CMYK
option is definitely not recommended (by me). Stick to printing to the
AdobePDF printer instance and fixing colours using third-party tools
like Quite-a-Box-of-Tricks, PitStopPro or PubliPDF.

[David_Crowe]

>>Adobe's European web store is a total rip-off...

And completely unbalanced:

upgrade in the "French" store = 549 euros for the French edition
upgrade in the "French" store = 477 euros for the English edition;
upgrade in the "UK" store = 362 pounds sterling, or 390 euros.

And last time I heard, all the European stores were serviced from a base in Scotland anyway (although I stand to be corrected on this).

As they don't say in Europe, go figure.

[AxialInfo]

Bravo! To Norbert and Arnis, for your persistence and efforts at detecting this egregious problem in FM9.

[Now if we can just get The Powers That Be to understand what a major body-blow they dealt to FM by changing the F9 functionality.]

[_Mats_Broberg_]

Hi,

To you who have tried it out:

Is there a "Package" command that collects fonts, images and docs into a specified folder, as the one in InDesign?

I'm using the Archive plugin in FM8, but that does not take of the fonts issue.

Regards,
Mats

[Arnis Gubins]

Mats,

Unfortunately, no. Bruce's Archive is the only tool for any type of
collection to date.

Perhaps, a suggestion to him that such an enhancement would be well
received might help?

http://home.comcast.net/~bruce.foster/index.html

[_Mats_Broberg_]

Arnis,

Yes, I have suggested it several times.

Regards,
Mats

[Seanb_us]

Thanks for the updates.

I've been wanting CMYK output from FrameMaker since version ... well ... 5.1 Adobe. I'm glad they tackled it. I'm surprised these issues didn't show in beta. I'm not excited with the result, though am very happy that Arnis and Norbert figured it out.

+1 Archive is a great plugin.

Cheers,

Sean

[Jim_Eisenbraun]

Useful information all around. Does anyone know if there have been any modifications to the h/j engine? along the lines, one hopes, of the InDesign engine?

Jim

[Michael_Müller-Hillebrand-basb]

Jim,

Could it be your are asking about hyphenation and justification?

Well, no changes to the layout engine, since... FrameMaker 5.5?

OTOH, that saved many people a lot of problems/work during updates ;-)

- Michael

[John_BW]

Hi,

In previous versions of the TCS, there was an "import from FrameMaker" function in RoboHelp; however, there was no "output to FrameMaker" (although there was an output to MS Word). In the new version of the TCS, is there a way to output to native FrameMaker documents from RoboHelp?

Thanks,
John B.

[_Jeff_Coatsworth_]

Sorry John - no output to FM9 from RH8 in the TCS 2.0 that I can see. I think it's designed to flow the other way - author in FM, publish to help in RH.