I just heard from Paul Findon that the petition to encourage Adobe to develop a version of FrameMaker for the Mac OS X has now exceeded 2,700 signatures. That's a lot of people, and even if you consider that Adobe may get only half of the $800 list price from retailers, we're still talking about over $1,000,000 in revenue from just the people who signed up. That assumes of course, that everyone signing the petition would ante up, but it's also likely there would be plenty of other customers too.

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

You can read the chronology of the petition and other supporting information on the petition's support site; note particularly the statements from two of our Take Control colleagues, Matt Neuburg and Caroline Rose. There's also now a Yahoo Groups mailing list for people who wish to discuss the issue.

http://www.infopage.net/fmforosx/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/fmforosx/

FrameMaker remains the pre-eminent tool for writing long, structured documents. I use and like InDesign, but it's far more of a graphical layout program than a structure publishing application. (And yes, I know about using InCopy with InDesign, but at $250 it's not cheap nor likely to become widespread, making it hard to require of other writers and editors.) You would think, given the increased recognition of the importance of structure and metadata these days, that Adobe would see the relevance of keeping FrameMaker or some similar tool in its software catalog.

http://www.adobe.com/products/incopy/