Newbie Question - Learn FrameMaker from scratch

Report · Jul 14, 2014

Hi All,

First of all, apologies for the cheesy screen name

I am an IT developer at an MNC in India and want to move to technical writing. I do have a brief formal technical writing experience before and have published an engineering course ware book too. I have good MS Word authoring skills, but I have never worked with FrameMaker.

Now I want to learn FM, from scratch!.

Can anybody here point me to a good source for a complete FM newbie? (with good Word skills)

Any good book
Video channel on youtube (highly needed, since in the day time, I have my job and I only have 26 days left for the trial )
Any other online resources / PDFs etc

I have started by looking at this link: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/framemaker/using/index.html But it seems like it is for FM experts / intermediates. Frankly, I thought learning FM would be easy, but as I browse through the questions in this forum, I realize it's a sea not a pond / puddle as I had initially thought of

Any sort of help would be highly appreciated. I am using the latest version, FrameMaker 12.

Thanks in Anticipation

- Navin

Report · Jul 14, 2014

Hi Navin,

You can check out some of the videos on the AdobeTV TechComm Channel at http://tv.adobe.com/channel/technical-communication/

The best reference book currently available is "Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 11" by Matt Sullivan and Sarah O'Keefe. For an ePub see: Books - Scriptorium Publishing or order the book from Amazon: Publishing Fundamentals: Unstructured FrameMaker 11

There also is the Adobe Classroom-in-a-Book series that has a version for FM11 by Barb Binder. For an electronic version see: Adobe FrameMaker 11 Classroom in a Book (don't get the Kindle version, the layouts are hard to read/use - the PDF is much better).

There's an online training course available from lynda.com. See: Watch the Online Video Course FrameMaker 10 Essential Training

VTC has a FM9 training video series available at: Adobe FrameMaker 9 Course Online

The basics don't change, so even FM9 training is quite valid for FM12,

Note: all of these refer to using FM in an unstructured mode. If you want to learn Structured FM (DITA, XML or even SGML), then you'll still need to understand the basics that unstructured FM provides.

Report · Jul 15, 2014

Hi Arnis,

Thanks for the quick reply. I am looking for a non-paid option right now. So, I guess I will give Lynda.com a skip for now.

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Navin Israni