Technical Communication & Information Design
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 */
In an earlier post, I described a situation in which WebWorks AutoMap throws a spurious Error communicating with FrameMaker message when a job is not scheduled with a valid user name and password.
Quadralay support has since confirmed this defect, which they describe as follows:
If your AutoMap job does not complete successfully, and it returns errors in the log regarding failed communication with FrameMaker, it’s possible that it was not able to run the job from the Windows scheduler (even if you are running it manually) due to invalid credentials.
That is, when you set up a job, you must provide a valid user name and password to schedule the conversion. If a job is executed, and it can’ t log in correctly, it may report errors in communicating with FrameMaker (because it can’t even communicate effectively with the system). To resolve the issue, right-click on the the job in the AutoMap interface and choose Schedule Job. If you’d like to schedule it for automated conversion, do so in the Windows task scheduler dialog that appears. Otherwise, just click OK. You’ll be prompted for a user name and password. Enter the correct credentials, click OK, and then run the job as usual.
If you’ve ever wrestled with WebWorks AutoMap, you may have seen the following messages in a log file at some point:
Attempting to Start FrameMaker communication...
Error communicating with Adobe FrameMaker.
These messages suggest that AutoMap can’t find FrameMaker (or vice versa), and if that’s the case, Quadralay offers a few suggestions in a TechNote.
But today I found out (the hard way) that these errors may in fact have nothing to do with the connection between AutoMap and FrameMaker…
Continue reading ‘WebWorks — Error communicating with FrameMaker’
Writing in the [Adobe Technical Communication blog] [1], FrameMaker Product Manager Aseem Dokania announced that Adobe is looking for [FrameMaker 8 beta testers] [2]. If you’re interested in participating in the Prerelease Beta 2 program, [sign up here] [3].
At the [STC conference] [4] in Minneapolis, several Adobe employees reportedly indicated that FrameMaker 8 is scheduled to ship before the end of the year.