Getting Creative with FrameMaker 1x and Windows 7

[Guest]

For some years I have been treading water with my FrameMaker installation, mainly because of nagging inconsistencies and 'unforeseen consequences' relating to Windows, Acrobat, FrameMaker (and the phases of the moon).

Back in 2009 I updated my workstation to a HP HP xw4600 with a Quad Core, 4GB ram, and 2 x 250GB SATA. I installed Win XP Pro and subsequently patched it to SP-3 with ALL the hotfixes, including 'WindowsXP-KB952909-v2-x86-ENU.exe', which fixes some PDF font issues. Having got FrameMaker 8.0p277 installed along with with Distiller 8.x.x everything more or less worked. Being a careful soul I made sure I used OpenType fonts where possible (Garamond Pro, Minion Pro & Myriad Pro - all licensed). So far, so good.

I got reckless and upgraded to Creative Suite Design Pro 4 with Acrobat Pro 9 and then installed it. Disaster. Acrobat 9.x.x and Distiller 8.x.x don't co-exist. And FrameMaker 8 doesn't particularly want to play with Acrobat/Distiller 9.x.x. Damn!

So, I pulled all the software offa my workstation, reinstalled Creative Suite Design Pro 4 and Acrobat Pro 9 on the xw4600, and installed FrameMaker 8.0p277 and Acrobat Pro 8.x.x on a HP dc7900 SFF that I just happened to have lying around :-). OS as before. Both machines fully patched.

This is not particularly efficient, but everything works. Howsomever, Win XP Pro, though I love it dearly, is slated for the chop in 2014 according to Microsoft. Now I managed to dodge the Vista bullet, but I have to start making plans to migrate to Win 7/8 in an orderly fashion.

Which brings me to Win 7.

Reading the Creative Suite forums suggests that CS 4/5/5.5 has 'issues' with Win 7, especially Win 7 64 bit. But you need 64 bit to use more than 3.46GB of RAM, and RAM is a very important commodity when you're running Photoshop. Very!

Also, FrameMaker 10 was released just before Win 7, and has it's own 'issues' with Win 7 64 bit (see recent posts in the Frame forum).

So, my question is: At what point do Windows 7/8, FrameMaker 10/11, Acrobat Pro X/XI, and Creative Suite 5.5/6 all get together and play reliably without munging fonts or locking up? Is this a pipe-dream, or is there a team at Adobe addressing the really big issue of collaboratively getting your stuff (!) together?

Just asking...

[Van Kurtz]

I do not know about the Windows version issues, but you should have only ONE version of Acrobat Pro installed on your system. In fact, when you install one of the later versions of Acrobat Pro, the installer should point this out to you. Once you get only one version of Acrobat, then FrameMaker will work correctly with it.

[Arnis Gubins]

Hi Laurence,

As Van says, having multiple Acrobat versions is a sure-fire recipe for interesting interactions. FM8 and Acrobat 9 actually do play very nice together, much better than Acrobat 8 did.

As far as Win7 64-bit and FM goes, it's got to be a configuration issue, as I have installations with no issues (so far). I'm currently using FM6-10 with the Acrobat X suite on one Win7 Ulitmate 64-bit machine and they all play nice (even SaveAsPDF for FM v.8 and.up). Some issues may be more Win7 related, such as using network mapped drives where the Win7 permissions don't always allow file manipulation; installation of some software (must run as administrator), etc. Proper tweaking of policies and/or running some apps in compatibility modes gets around most of the obstacles.

[Guest]

There's a slightly tangent (but still germane) issue about font munging for many "old time" FMers who use older Type1 PS fonts (e.g. Helvetica) and who also happen to have upgraded to Office 2010.

Office apps, especially Outlook and Word, crash when these PS fonts are installed. The event log msg involves "usp10.dll" which is the Uniscribe component that MS uses to render fonts. FM doesn't use Uniscribe, but application crashes involving fonts would always seem to put FM at greater risk, even if only from gobbling RAM or whacking the font cache and thus requiring reboot.

MS finally released a hotfix for this issue, which from my testing seems to have solved the problem.

More info:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/767210

Sheila