Adobe FrameMaker for Mac OS X

About FrameMaker

FrameMaker is the premier authoring and publishing application for long, structured technical documents such as books and instruction manuals. Eighteen years since it was first released, it's still the tool of choice for technical writers around the world. There simply is nothing else!

Frame Technology, cofounded by Steve Kirsch, Charles Corfield, David Murray, and Vickie Blakeslee in 1986, released FrameMaker Version 1.3 in 1988. Kevin Lynch, now Senior Vice President and Chief Software Architect, Platform Business Unit at Adobe, created the Mac version (many thanks, Kevin). The Windows version came later. Its main competitor at that time was Interleaf. Adobe acquired Frame Technology and FrameMaker in 1995.

FrameMaker is a fantastic app that does exactly what it says on the box - long documents—no more, no less. It's perfect for technical documents and books of between 10 and 10,000 pages, although it's also used to produce letters, newsletters, CD/DVD artwork, faxes, and so on. It's used by publishing professionals around the world. Boeing used it to document the 777—imagine how many thousands of pages that required. One of its major strengths is that it's available for Mac, Windows, and UNIX so documents can easily be shared (no other app supports all three platforms). For example, a software developer, engineer, or scientist can use FrameMaker on their UNIX workstation in the office, transfer their documents to their Macintosh laptop and continue working on them anywhere. And this isn't the 95% cross-platform compatibility that you get with some apps. It's 100% compatibility!

FrameMaker supported hypertext long before the World Wide Web was even thought of. It also supports tables, cross-references, character formats, variables, PDF, SGML, XML, and so on. In the '90s, you could easily spot a document made in FrameMaker because it contained tables and cross-references like a real document should. In contrast, manuals made with PageMaker, InDesign, and QuarkXPress stand out because of their lack of cross-referencing. Then there's the equation editor, multilingual support, including double-byte (Japanese, Chinese, Korean), footnotes, and conditional text. The list is endless.

Unlike some apps, FrameMaker is fast and reliable—it doesn't suffer from bloat—crashes are virtually non-existent, as is document corruption (PageMaker and Word users know all about that). Unlike certain page-layout apps, tables and graphics are anchored to, and flow with the text so adding new text at the beginning of a document doesn't cause them to slip out of place.

I'm not really sure why I'm trying to justify FrameMaker's existence—thousands of technical publishers around the world use it everyday. That speaks volumes!

Click here for some screen shots of Mac FrameMaker 7.0.

Click here for a PDF showing the Mac FrameMaker 7.0 workspace.

Click here for the official Adobe FrameMaker page.

Click here for FrameMaker history, with timeline, development history, and FrameMaker-related Seybold Reports.

See also FrameMaker at Wikipedia.