Upgrading to Frame 9 & Filters

[galson]

I’ve been monitoring various threads during FM 9.0’s maturation process and it *appears* most early problems have been patched. Before upgrading, however, would appreciate advice or comments from you good folk.

In addition to (1) general curiosity re: compelling reasons to upgrade, I am specifically interested in (2) improvements to import/export filters.  In 7.2, I wasn’t particularly impressed either with saving a .FM file as a Word .doc or with opening a Word .doc in FM. Does 9.0 have improved filters?

Note: I sent this e-mail to the frameusers list but got an "undeliverable" error. Sorry if either effort ends up in cross-posting...

TIA,

Gay

[Arnis Gubins]

Gay,

If you're moving from 7.2 to 9, then it's a pretty major step. You do have to get used to the new interface, as it is a different way of working. Also many of the old-style keyboard shortcuts do have limitations (such as type-ahead searching for catalog entries only uses the first character to match), that can be quite irritating if you're set in the old-style ways. Having unicode is a big plus, but it also takes some getting used if you been using codepage specific fonts for languages.

The Filters have been improved for reading Word documents. I can't atest to the export ones, as I use mif2go when I Word content from FM. There are a number of additional filters and many of the older formats have been deprecated (i.e. commented out of the maker.ini, but can still be re-activated if needed).

[galson]

Thanks very much, Arnis, I appreciate your information; it will be useful in the decision about upgrading.

Cheers,

Gay

[Jeff_Coatsworth]

Remember, you can always "try before you buy" with the demo files and the new virtual sandbox that Adobe is providing for those with slow internet connections ;>)