Technical Communication & Information Design
Mahesh Gupta has announced the release of a FrameMaker 8.0.3 patch, which addresses a long list of bugs and workflow issues, including the proper resolution of DITA content references.
The update is available via the Adobe Update Manager (Help > Updates), and should show up on the FrameMaker Downloads page sometime soon.
Mahesh Gupta, Adobe’s FrameMaker Product Manager announced the availability of the Version 8.0.2 update in a post on the Technical Communication blog.
This patch (8.0p273) must be applied on top of 8.0.1 (8.0p266) only.
The update covers a series of minor bugs and annoyances, including several related to Unicode characters and XML roundtripping and the status bar shortcuts (Ctrl+F8, Ctrl+F9) for the paragraph and character catalogs (see the post for the full list).
The update is available via the Adobe Update Manager (Help > Updates), and should show up on the FrameMaker Downloads page sometime soon.
Today Adobe announced the release of the new Technical Communication Suite, a bundle that includes the following programs:
The press release touts a “major upgrade to RoboHelp”, but apart from that, it remains to be seen how useful the new bundling scheme will prove as many of those with a need for software like this certainly already own one or more of the tools in the package.
The FrameMaker 8 Plug-in for DITA Open Toolkit is now available from Adobe.
The package restores the Generate Output command that was introduced with the FrameMaker 7.2 Application Pack for DITA and unfortunately missing from the released version of FrameMaker 8.
Leximation and Silicon Publishing have announced the release of DITA-FMx, a new plugin for Adobe FrameMaker that provides extended DITA support and corrects a number of bugs in the Application Pack for DITA.
DITA-FMx is a plugin and set of structure applications that let you create and edit DITA XML files in FrameMaker. The version currently available supports DITA 1.0 and is only available for FrameMaker 7.2. A version that supports DITA 1.1 for FrameMaker 7.2 and 8.0 is under development.
If you’re already using FrameMaker 7.2 with the Application Pack for DITA, this new plugin will not provide new functionality, but does fix/update a number of features available in Beta 2 of the app pack.
Sarah O’Keefe of Scriptorium Publishing has published her first impressions of FrameMaker 8, including a charming and mildly disturbing delineation of the significance of the new icon. 
The review also includes a link to her FrameMaker Developer Center article on the new complex conditional processing features, an extremely helpful explanation of how to use the new Boolean logic with conditional text and combinations of attribute values in structured FrameMaker to support what she calls “extreme versioning.”
The DITA application pack that was previously available from Adobe Labs for use with FrameMaker 7.2 has now been rolled in to FrameMaker 8, enhanced to support Unicode and extended to generate a single compound FrameMaker document from a DITA map file.
This latter bit allows you to roll a DITA project into a standalone FrameMaker document, which you can save as a PDF file, for example.
This is all well and good, and was hinted at in various sneak peaks Adobe provided in advance, but there’s one big caveat that they’re not talking about much…
Installation Surprise #3: The version of the app pack included with FM8 doesn’t allow output (such as CHM or HTML) to be generated via the DITA Open Toolkit!
The User Guide dwells on this glaring omission for all of one line:
Note: The DITA application pack no longer supports the functionalities available through the use of the open toolkit (OT).
While it’s understandable that Adobe was not keen on supporting the complexities of DITA-OT configurations with myriad Ant versions, JDK installations and the slew of environment variables that need to be set just right for it all to work, this is certainly a step backwards from the freely available application pack, and hardly the integrated DITA authoring environment many had hoped FM8 might be.
Certainly plug-in authors will step up to the plate to fill this gap, but it would’ve been so much nicer out of the box—after all, it’s really only a batch file that gets called in the background.
Update [2007-08-02] This just in from Adobe:
DITA OT integration with FrameMaker 8 will be available as a web download from Adobe site in a few days.
Thanks, Vivek!
2007-08-31: The Adobe FrameMaker 8 Plug-in for DITA Open Toolkit is now available for download from Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/framemaker/fm8_opentoolkit.html.
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…