[Hidden-tech] Framemaker

[Chris Hoogendyk]

Roger Williams wrote:
>    ** Be sure to fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area.
>    ** If you did, we all thank you.
>
>
>   
>>>>>> Linda Taylor <lintaylor at verizon.net> writes:
>>>>>>             
>
>   > Thank you for your comments on Framemaker. As I feared you just can't do a
>   > lot of things I want to do. Although there are loyal users who value it
>   > for long books, I think other layout programs are catching up and are more
>   > commonly used by publishers...
>
> Amazingly, Framemaker is still the sole product Adobe suggests for technical
> communication.  The irony is not lost on folks actually involved in technical
> communication, who are still shaking their heads over Adobe's decision to
> effectively kill FM five years ago when they decided not to port it to OSX and
> dropped all other non-Windows platforms.
>
> Unfortunately, I have yet to talk to a technical writer who has come up with a
> suitable alternative; if you want an app that will do both authoring and
> publishing, like FrameMaker, there simply isn't one.  We've evaluated inDesign,
> Ragtime, Papyrus, KWord, Mellel, and OpenOffice, and none of them quite fit
> the bill.  For now, we're running Windows FM7 under Parallels (or Wine), which
> is quite painful.
>
> I'd be very interested in hearing what solution other technical writers -- and
> technical publishers! -- have come up with!

In Mathematics, Astronomy, Physics -- it's TeX, and it's various 
semi-GUI implementations. However, that's probably too technical for 
ordinary technical writers. There are scientific journals in those 
fields that are published using TeX and that require papers to be 
submitted in TeX format. When it comes to complex mathematics, that's 
really the only systematic, rigorous and reproducible way of specifying 
how to typeset a formula or an equation. GUI's don't cut it, and 
PostScript is too free form and malleable.

If you haven't heard of it, or are not very familiar with it, a good 
starting point is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX. You can get the 
pieces for it generally open source and for Linux, Mac or Windows. If 
you are a professional technical writer and work with math, computer 
science, engineering or physical science clients, you should know about 
TeX. Google also turns up linguistics as a field that uses TeX for some 
journals.

It's not surprising that commercial software companies would not mention 
TeX. It's open source, originally developed by Donald Knuth 
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_knuth) as an example for teaching 
the art of computer programming. I used his textbook in college 
approaching 40 years ago, and they are still using the same textbook in 
computer science courses today. Get the fundamentals down well, then you 
can move on.


-- 
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Chris Hoogendyk

-
   O__  ---- Systems Administrator
  c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
 (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

<hoogendyk at bio.umass.edu>

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Erdös 4