FrameMaker replacements

On 6/4/04 2:00 PM, "Roy Ward" <royvideoscript.com> wrote:

> Shame about the steep learning curve - the way I ended up learning
> LaTeX was by biting the bullet and switching too it (actually in a fit
> of annoyance after MS-Word crashed while saving a document - hopelessly
> corrupting the document in the process). The plus side is that I've
> found the LaTeX user community is more helpful than any user community
> I've been part of.

That's really only an option in academia or research. In corporate america,
your access to those resources is severely limited, so your source of help
is a help desk. There's no way in hades I'm doing phone support for *TeX...
that kind of application pretty much requires you to be self supporting.

john

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

I've used both MS Word and TeX --LaTeX, actually-- for long documents. LaTeX was the medium for four books (long out of print) which I edited and typeset over 10 years ago. I use MS Word for lecture notes (275 pages this semester http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ham/UTCS/CS336/Lectures/cs336LectureNotes.html) and other academic output.

For typesetting the books in LaTeX we used Blue Sky Research's TeXtures package, which provides nearly instantaneous WYSIWYG output. Unfortunately TeXtures runs only in Classic, but I understand there are other OS X-native LaTeX packages available.

For me the benefits of true WYSIWYG editing offset the disadvantages of MS Word, and it helps that thanks to a university site license my cost for MS Word is $5 --compared to $369 for TeXtures. And it's worth noting that my lecture notes don't need much in the way of footnotes, references, or indexes --all of which are a real mess in MS Word.

--Ham Richards (CS Department, Univ. of TexasAustin)

[Let's try to wind down on the TeX vs Word discussion and return if possible to the main topic of FrameMaker replacements. -Adam]

on 6/7/04 12:48 pm, John C. Welch at jwelchbynkii.com wrote:

> On 6/4/04 2:00 PM, "Nigel Stanger" <nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz> wrote:
>
>> Regardless, the output format is irrelevant as far as
>> the quality of the output is concerned. You can easily produce a document
>> that looks like absolute crap using PostScript. The reason TeX-produced
>> documents look so good is because the TeX engine has the rules of good
>> typesetting built into it.
>
> Output it into a 72 DPI bitmap format and see how nice it looks. It won't
> look like garbage, but you're going to lose a LOT. Both PS and PDF are
> vector formats, and you are going to get better looking output from that. If
> that weren't true, Adobe would have never made any money from Postscript.

I think you two are talking about completely different things here. It
doesn't matter what tool you use--72 DPI is going to look bad on paper. But
even at 72 DPI, the TeX document is going to have things placed where you
placed them, in the fonts and stylings you specified. That's not a guarantee
with Word; if your document is at all complex, Word is almost guaranteed to
mess something up the first time.

I'll accept that you may be one of those rare people who never has any
trouble with Word. Most of us have had a different experience.
Theoretically, it is possible to do everything in exactly the right way to
get Word to do things correctly. But that right way isn't documented, isn't
logical most of the time, and isn't something most people have the time or
patience to figure out. TeX may be more complex to learn on the surface, but
that's still easier than figuring out some of Word's bizarre quirks.

> 2) You have to be an absolute tyrant about fonts and formats. In other
> words, you get one graphics format, chose now. You get at most 4 fonts. None
> shall be Tahoma. Any deviance will be redlined and sent back.

These restrictions pretty well cut Word out of the running in suitability
for long-document creation. I'm writing a lengthy document on, say,
comparative linguistics, and I can't use more than four fonts? Ridiculous.
The tool should adapt to the needs of the user, not the other way around. If
I have to compromise my needs to fit the program's quirks, I'll find another
program to use.

Mark D. McKean
qpandaquantumpanda.com

John Welch wrote

Oh, TeX is definitely a better long document application than Word, but the idea that you can't use Word for complex docs, or you can't get good output from word is just not correct.

Various other such comments were made by others. I'm mystified how John and others have managed this. I've used Word on the Mac and Windows since Word 3, and I consider myself to be reasonably sophisticated. But I've never managed to get a large document to work correctly. The most common problem is numbering of things. (If you don't believe that Word numbering is completely messed up, take a look at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Numbering/WordsNumberingExplained.htm.) Add multiple files to the equation (such as each chapter in its own file), and it becomes completely hopeless.

From the description, TeX sounds similar in concept to nroff/troff. So I suppose it would not be difficult for me to learn, but I could see the learning curve to be very steep for those who have never used anything but a GUI WYSIWYG editor.

Nigel Stanger wrote:

The same source will _always_ produce the same output. I've processed TeX documents that were written over ten years ago, and they still format the same way as they did originally. Not many WYSIWYG tools can claim such a record.

Not only does Word change the formatting from version to version, it also changes it from person to person, from printer to printer, from machine to machine, and apparently random choices. I remember a time a few years back where 7 of us printed out the same (approximately 200 page, single file) document and we came out with 7 different paginations because of subtly different character and line layouts. We could find no pattern to how Word chose this. Even when we tried the same printer, the same source file, the same version of Word, the same version of Windows, and the same printer, we still got different layouts!

On 6/8/04 7:57 AM, "John Lemon" <jalemoncomcast.net> wrote:

> Various other such comments were made by others. I'm mystified how John and
> others have managed this. I've used Word on the Mac and Windows since Word 3,
> and I consider myself to be reasonably sophisticated. But I've never managed
> to get a large document to work correctly. The most common problem is
> numbering of things. (If you don't believe that Word numbering is completely
> messed up, take a look at
> http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Numbering/WordsNumberingExplained.htm.)
> Add multiple files to the equation (such as each chapter in its own file), and
> it becomes completely hopeless.

As with anything, when you have large documents, created by multiple people,
you have to be disciplined in your workflow. That's independent of the tool.
We simply analyzed the workflow, and came up with ways to make things work
smoothly. We had to, because we needed administrative folks with good
grammar to compensate for the scientist's lack thereof.

Word was the best tool to do this. We simply realized that there are things
you avoid, like Master Documents. Nice idea , but crappy implementation.
Styles simplified things even further. We created common templates that were
used in all document creation.

In other words, we *planned* rather than just throwing it together and
hoping it worked. It worked out really well, and because we were all working
from the same page, it allowed us to use a variety of tools really well.

john

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

On 6/8/04 7:57 AM, "John Lemon" <jalemoncomcast.net> wrote:

> Not only does Word change the formatting from version to version, it also
> changes it from person to person, from printer to printer, from machine to
> machine, and apparently random choices. I remember a time a few years back
> where 7 of us printed out the same (approximately 200 page, single file)
> document and we came out with 7 different paginations because of subtly
> different character and line layouts. We could find no pattern to how Word
> chose this. Even when we tried the same printer, the same source file, the
> same version of Word, the same version of Windows, and the same printer, we
> still got different layouts!

That's a problem, and it's probably one reason why they're going to XML
based formats. They tried the OLE-based stuff, and they tried really hard to
make it work as they wanted it to work, but no go.

TeX actually has it easier than Word in one sense. They don't have customers
wanting it to be all things to all people. If it's hard to use, who cares,
TeX users almost take pride in that. If it requires complex macros for basic
use, that's fine too. No one is going to use TeX for everything from letters
to Mom to complex documents. Well, SOMEONE will, I knew a guy who composed
his letters in raw postscript code. But it's not going to be real common.

Word has to do every kind of word processing that anyone can think of and do
it well. It has to be everything and nothing, and all at the same price. It
has to have a simple UI that is easy to use and can handle uber-power users.
That's not easy to pull off.

Also, contrary to popular belief, the *VAST* majority, (I'd guess oh, 95%)
of "useless" features in Word are not put there by Microsoft programmers who
had a bright idea on the way to work. They're put there because of customer
requests and needs. Office is *very* customer driven. So when (the
collective) you start kvetching about "useless" features in Word, remember
that to someone else, the features YOU can't live without are just as
useless. Maybe if everyone didn't request Word become the one application,
it wouldn't try to be that.

john

--
John C. Welch Writer/Analyst
Bynkii.com Mac and other opinions
jwelchbynkii.com

Folks interested in TeX as a possible long-document tool might like to take a look at XeTeX, a new implementation for Mac OS X that is based on Unicode, providing strong multilingual features. It also offers easy access to your installed fonts (traditionally a complex area in TeX, which has its own platform-independent world of fonts), including AAT and OpenType "smart" font features. XeTeX is a tool that works with a standard Mac OS X TeX installation, and with existing GUIs for TeX, such as TeXShop or iTeXMac.

Disclosure statement: I am the developer of XeTeX (but no, I'm not making anything out of this, it's free).

I'm not a computer expert or a mathematician, but rather a book editor and designer. When I started typesetting 35 years ago, there were still some Linotypes and Ludlows around. These gave way to Justowriters, Varitypers, IBM Selectric composers, and Compugraphics. Then in 1985, Apple followed up its cute 1984 Macintosh with the Laserwriter and Postscript, and I've never looked back. I began with PageMaker 1.0 on a Mac Plus, and several dozen Macs later, I'm up to PageMaker 7.0, though I'm now beginning the transition to InDesign. In addition to literally thousands of issues of newspapers, magazines, and newsletters, I've edited and designed in Mac PageMaker more than 300 books, ranging from poetry chapbooks to 800-page academic histories with lots of footnotes, bibliographies, indexes, etc.

PageMaker has been an excellent long-document tool for me, though, again, I don't typeset math or science texts and I do understand the value of Tex for those needs. Used properly with true Postscript fonts and careful use of style sheets and master pages, PageMaker can produce quite beautiful and consistent typography. Its built-in text editor has a lot of power for massaging crudely formatted text files imported from all manner of word processors. You can also use PageMaker's text editor and read tags feature to auto-format tab-delimited database files exported from FileMaker, using Filemaker's formulas to put the desired style tags at the beginnings of paragraphs. PageMaker's built-in TOC and index generators work reasonably well, even if their output needs tweaking at the final design stage to achieve elegance. And once you really learn it, PageMaker is fast. We have our own in-house print on demand setup, and if I am given at 8 a.m. a 100,000-word plain text word processing document that has already been edited and proofread, I can hand you a well-designed, nicely typeset 400-page 6x9 paperback book by 5 p.m.

I'm sure InDesign is a step forward that a year from now I'll be glad I took, but I'm also sure that I'm going to miss PageMaker.

Randall Williams NewSouth Books Montgomery, Alabama

On 11/6/2004 11:14 AM, "John C. Welch" <jwelchbynkii.com> spake thus:

> In other words, we *planned* rather than just throwing it together and
> hoping it worked. It worked out really well, and because we were all working
> from the same page, it allowed us to use a variety of tools really well.

That's one of the things I really like about the XML-based authoring scheme
that I'm now moving into. Although there's only two of us using it at
present, because we're using the same XSL style sheets we know that all our
documents will come out with a similar appearance in both print and on the
web.

If Microsoft does go to XML-based file formats and more important, doesn't
screw it up by going all proprietary like they usually do, I could see
myself going back to using Word as a tool for editing and producing XML
source (now that would be ironic :) Even better, if you could save Word
documents as DocBook files... whoo. Too much to hope for, probably :)

--
=Nigel Stanger, Dunedin, NEW ZEALAND.
mailto:nstangerinfoscience.otago.ac.nz

I've been following this FrameMaker v. Word v. TeX thread with
interest, as I currently use InDesign for long documents,
specifically for book work.

Its particular USP for me is the way it adjusts loose lines by
reflowing the whole paragraph, whereas in Quark, for example, _every_
line would need to be wrapped manually.

What it doesn't give me (and I've not yet discovered a plug-in to
assist), is automatic footnotes like Word, and they're so
time-consuming to place manually.

So I've been fascinated to read about TeX in its various flavours,
and now Jonathan Kew's comments about Xetex (support for Unicode and
Mac OS X fonts) have pretty much convinced to take TeX for a test
drive.

Before I do so, however, can anyone give me (or point me to) any TeX
v. InDesign comparisons in terms of quality of compositing, automatic
footnotes/endnotes, freestanding sidebars, incorporating
figures/photos, tasks that are a breeze in one but a real hassle in
the other, etc?

Please contact me off-list and I'll summarise.

Chris Reed, BBR Solutions Ltd * http://www.bbr-online.com

On Jun 12, 2004, at 4:33 AM, Nigel Stanger wrote:

> If Microsoft does go to XML-based file formats and more important,
> doesn't
> screw it up by going all proprietary like they usually do, I could see
> myself going back to using Word as a tool for editing and producing XML
> source (now that would be ironic :) Even better, if you could save
> Word
> documents as DocBook files... whoo. Too much to hope for, probably :)

I highly doubt they arent going to try to input SOMETHING that wont
work with other XML-based systems.

Take a look at HTML. They brought a bunch of new tags/behaviors to the
table, and sat back to watch other browsers either catch up or die out.

This is a little bit different though, as Word isn't a standard Windows
program (meaning it doesnt come installed on all PCs like Internet
Explorer does).

This thread in general:

I've really enjoyed this thread so far. I would like to thank all
those who have participated. I was just recently looking for a
solution to making PDF files without having to spend a fortune on
software. I went through the process of installing TeX, then Xelex(?)
and then TeXShop. It was pretty painless after I read a BUNCH of info
on the subject. I think thats what may put people off when trying
Tex/LaTex. A lot of the documentation is written as if you already
know what it is. I have heard of TeX/LaTeX a long time ago, but didnt
know what it was, or even interested in what it was until this thread
kept popping into my inbox.

Now, im just searching around looking for some basic formatting codes
to get myself started.

Anyhow, a personal thanks goes out to those who have brought info to
this thread of messages (everyone).

Christopher

Although such a petition seems highly unlikely to sway Adobe, I don't
see any harm in making clear that FrameMaker is a much-loved program
by many people.

cheers... -Adam

--- begin forwarded text

From: Paul Findon
Subject: Adobe FrameMaker for Mac OS X Petition

Fellow FrameMaker Users,

As you have no doubt heard, Adobe Systems has discontinued FrameMaker for
the Macintosh, and there has been no announcement regarding a version for
Mac OS X. My company is 99% Mac, 99% FrameMaker, so this is very
disappointing news for us. Personally, I have used FrameMaker on the Mac
every working day for the last 11 years, and I still think it's a fantastic
product. Adobe has offered a cross-grade to the Windows version, but this is
not an option for us.

If, like me, you want Adobe to develop and release a version of FrameMaker
for Mac OS X, please sign the online petition that I've set up.

<http://www.PetitionOnline.com/fmforosx/petition.html>.

Please forward this message to all FrameMaker users you know.

Thank you for your support

Paul Findon

--- end forwarded text

After an intense period of busyness, I've finally read through this thread.

I'm surprised to find that no one has suggested (or perhaps they did
and I forgot, in which I case I apologize)... FrameMaker may indeed
have a possible future on OS X, via the path taken by Matlab . Adobe
could choose to deal with it as a UNIX application - port it to
Darwin and run inside X11. (GRASS, a GIS app, is taking this route,
and ESRI is rumored to be doing the same.)

Sure it wouldn't have all the lovely Macness, but the market is
specialized enough that that might be OK. Seems to work for the
Matlab folks hereabouts.

--
Andrew Laurence
atlaurenuci.edu

On 08-07-2004 04:44:48, Andrew Laurence wrote:

>After an intense period of busyness, I've finally read through this thread.
>
>I'm surprised to find that no one has suggested (or perhaps they did
>and I forgot, in which I case I apologize)... FrameMaker may indeed
>have a possible future on OS X, via the path taken by Matlab . Adobe
>could choose to deal with it as a UNIX application - port it to
>Darwin and run inside X11. (GRASS, a GIS app, is taking this route,
>and ESRI is rumored to be doing the same.)

I've seen this suggested in other discussions:
<http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/24/1512211&mode=nested&tid=179&tid=185&tid=190>

The answer there was that a Unix port would still cost a lot of effort, effort which Adobe
doesn't seem to be prepared to spend (if they were, they wouldn't have declared FM Mac
dead...).

Harro de Jong

There have been various Unix versions of FrameMaker for years, but Adobe has been slowly dropping support for them. Currently (v7.1) they only have a version for Solaris (see http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/systemreqs.html).

Kevin

At 8:35 PM -0700 7/13/04, Kevin Sahr wrote:
>There have been various Unix versions of FrameMaker for years, but
>Adobe has been slowly dropping support for them. Currently (v7.1)
>they only have a version for Solaris (see
><http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/systemreqs.html)>http://www.adobe.com/products/framemaker/systemreqs.html).
>
>Kevin

Boggles the mind that there's more business case for Solaris than OS
X. Thus the thinking that a Darwin/X11 port would be relatively
inexpensive and well-received by the Mac audience.

[One big customer. -Adam]

--
Andrew Laurence
atlaurenuci.edu

> In fact, I am willing to reboot into Mac OS 9 in order to run Frame on
> occasion, and this is in fact necessary in order to generate PDFs with
> Frame.

Not so. Acrobat distiller was distributed with Frame 6 & 7; and it runs
fine in Classic. Use the Chooser under Classic to select, e.g.,
Laserwriter 8 as your printer; and in the Print dialog, specify saving
to a file. Print a document or a whole book, producing docname.ps. Drag
and drop onto the Distiller.

At print time you can use the FrameMaker panel of the print dialog to
set up your PDF bookmarks and other options. In Distiller, you can set
a variety of "job options" that are simply not available when
generating PDF under OS X. In fact, the PDFs produced by this method
are much, much smaller than OS X default PDFs -- as well as having full
control of bookmarks, font embedding, etc.

And it's all in Classic mode, no reboot.

Dave Cortesi

> Boggles the mind that there's more business case for Solaris than OS X.
> Thus the thinking that a Darwin/X11 port would be relatively inexpensive
> and well-received by the Mac audience.

Most likely this "business case" is a few or more companies like Boeing,
GM, etc... who have extensive complex documentation that makes it
affordable for them to pay top dollar to keep it going.

[Somehow my comment didn't show up in the email that went out - it's reportedly a single customer, though I don't know who. -Adam]

At 9:01 PM -0700 7/15/04, David Ross wrote:
>>Boggles the mind that there's more business case for Solaris than
>>OS X. Thus the thinking that a Darwin/X11 port would be relatively
>>inexpensive and well-received by the Mac audience.
>
>Most likely this "business case" is a few or more companies like
>Boeing, GM, etc... who have extensive complex documentation that
>makes it affordable for them to pay top dollar to keep it going.
>
>[Somehow my comment didn't show up in the email that went out - it's
>reportedly a single customer, though I don't know who. -Adam]

...perhaps the single customer is... Sun?

I suspect that any goodwill to be had by Apple, from Adobe,
disappeared with the introduction of Final Cut Pro and similar
products that marginalized Adobe on the Mac platform.

Ken P.