Technical Communication & Information Design
Installation Surprise #2: Another thing about the new FrameMaker 8 that Adobe hasn’t mentioned is immediately apparent after installation—the program now has a tabbed interface and the toolbar has received a colorful (if somewhat half-hearted) makeover.
FrameMaker users have been complaining for years about the antiquated interface, and while a tab bar and a few garish icons certainly aren’t anything to brag about, it is nice to see that someone has been listening to the lists.
Installation Surprise #1: One of the new FrameMaker 8 “features” Adobe carefully neglects to mention is that the application now requires activation—like most of their other products nowadays.
As usual, the program will run for 30 days without activation, but thereafter you’ll need to run the activation procedure and hope they got it right this time.
In the past, there have been a number of issues with these proprietary activation schemes that do little to deter skilled pirates and often prove annoying for paying customers that have the nerve to upgrade machines, use drive imaging software, or just generally resent being treated like criminals…
Adobe has announced that FrameMaker 8.0 will be available by the end of July.
The new features are quite close to the list published earlier and include enhanced XML roundtripping and out-of-the-box DITA support—though it remains to be seen if the DITA features add anything beyond those previously included in the FM 7.2 Application Pack for DITA.
Now downloading, more soon…
“Yet Another Multicolumn Layout” (YAML) is an XHTML/CSS framework for creating CSS-based float layouts.
YAML 3 offers a greatly simplified file structure, even more resilience and accessibility in the CSS components, speed-optimized versions of the components for the live server, as well as numerous new layout examples.
A framework like this can be a godsend to anyone who’s ever spent days debugging browser-specific CSS code, and the new version now sports extensive bilingual documentation in both German and English—including downright exhaustive CSS comments according to CSSDOC.
The CSSDOC project is essentially a concept for storing Javadoc comments in CSS, and applies common coding conventions to CSS, such as commenting your code and grouping your CSS rules.
For those who find Eclipse a bit intimidating to install, configure and maintain (or just appreciate a simpler approach), there’s now an easier way—EasyEclipse bills itself as ” …easy to download and install, and simple to maintain, without version and dependency issues”.
By packaging together Eclipse, the open-source software development platform, and selected open source plugins, EasyEclipse strives to improve the way Eclipse is distributed by doing away with the many of the annoyances associated with setting up the IDE, such as “large downloads with many components or plugins you don’t need, too many similar plugins to choose from, version incompatibility between plugins and the Eclipse platform or other plugins…”
Adobe has announced that they have completed selection of around 300 volunteers for the FrameMaker 8 Prerelease Beta 2 Testing Program and will not be accepting any more participants.
So while that may sound like bad news if you weren’t fortunate enough to be selected, it’s certainly good news in the sense that FrameMaker 8 is indeed making progress towards release…
One of the nice things about single sourcing with WebWorks and FrameMaker is that you can embed context information in your FrameMaker source files using custom markers, which WebWorks processes when creating context-sensitive help formats such as Microsoft HTML Help.
However, if you’re considering upgrading from an earlier version of WebWorks Publisher to the latest ePublisher platform release (currently version 9.2.2 build #10315), you should be aware of a significant change in the way that TopicAlias markers are handled.
In WWP6, the contents of TopicAlias markers were treated as numeric MapIDs, and WWP autogenerated text aliases based on the text of the heading in which the TopicAlias marker was inserted.
For example, if you inserted 1002 in a TopicAlias marker, WWP6 would generate a mapping entry as follows:
#define Heading_Text1002 1002 /* Heading Text */
Now in WWeP 9, the contents of TopicAlias markers are instead treated as text aliases, and WWeP instead generates its own map IDs based on the sequence in which TopicAlias markers appear in source files.
In WWeP, the example above is now output as follows:
#define 1002 10000010 /* Heading Text */