Adobe FrameMaker for Mac OS X

Mac FrameMaker User Testimonials

Bill Briggs—Macworld Contributor, Senior Instructor, University of New Brunswick

"I'm probably better known to Mac users for having written the AppleScript Primer column that ran for a little over a year on MacCentral, but I'm a long-time serious FrameMaker junkie and in more than a decade of use I've written and typeset thousands of pages of software manuals for digital telephone switches (not something you'd see at the local bookstore), designed and typeset documents for government and University, designed and typeset books for independent writer/publishers, created numerous templates for use in the telecom industry, among others, and have at times spent 50 hours or more a week working in FrameMaker. Heck, for fun one weekend I made a template in FrameMaker that duplicates exactly the look of David Pogue's Missing Manual series. At MacWorld a couple of years ago I holstered FrameMaker in a layout application shootout with Quark and InDesign, and FrameMaker held its own. It still does things the others can't manage. And it's the only word processor I've used in the last 11 years. It's a pity that Adobe didn't try to market Frame because once they see what it can do, users love it. Predictable behaviour is a highly desirable attribute in any software."

"FrameMaker is simply without peer in the handling of long living documents, but is also easy to use as a word processor for those one page letters. It is able to cope with enormous books with thousands of pages, hundreds of individual chapter files, thousands of figures, and on and on. It doesn't choke when the going gets heavy. Microsoft Word simply cannot do what Frame does with ease and reliability. For me the absence of an OS X version of FrameMaker is a kind of death by a thousand cuts. Sure, Classic works, but it's a resource hog. The desire to create new collateral in FrameMaker is low because of its being on life support, and the thought of its eventual demise is painful whenever I think of it. With a decade worth of documents done in FrameMaker sitting on my hard drive, the OS X version of this application is something I want more than anything for my Mac. Frame has some long standing irritants, and the AppleScript implementation needs some serious debugging, but it's such a wonderful, reliable, tool that I'd pay an annual fee to use it if they did nothing more than get it ported to OS X. Somehow, some way, this has got to happen."

Nelson E. Claytor, Ph.D.—President, Fresnel Technologies, Inc.

"My company has used and continues to use FrameMaker to prepare all its literature for print and the web. I also used FrameMaker to prepare my Ph.D. thesis in physics. There is simply nothing else like it for those of us that need to prepare documents with many cross-references, figures, tables, and the like. I am most disappointed that Adobe has chosen to orphan Mac FrameMaker users, especially as the Mac OS X platform suits the needs of technical users so well. I have not bought an update for quite a few years, but not because I don't want to--Adobe has not made one available. I would really like to be able to continue purchasing upgrades from Adobe, but have no interest in moving to another platform."

Richard Cook—Unicode Editorial Committee and UC Berkeley Linguistics Department

(These are Richard Cook's own comments and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Unicode Editorial Committee or Unicode Consortium.)

"I'm in a bit of a bind here, since Adobe has killed off FrameMaker for Mac. Whether or not it will be resurrected or replaced by Adobe, my faith in Adobe's ability to provide application support for the long-term survival of my legacy publication data has been shaken, in fact, down-right gutted. Print publication of the Unicode Standard relies on (Windows) FrameMaker in no small measure. I'm concerned that publication of the Standard might be similarly hobbled in the future. Perhaps even Windows FrameMaker users should be thinking about alternatives, or about back-up publication tools. This may not be so critical today, but might be in the future. Certainly, a lot of fine work goes into book publication, and it's a great pity, never mind expensive, if it has to be redone with a new application. I know there are movements afoot to resurrect Mac FrameMaker, and people within Adobe itself who feel the same way I do about the loss of this product, and stability issues in general. Hopefully, there are recent developments I know nothing about... But for now, I need a Mac OS X book publishing app with great Unicode and XML support, and I need it yesterday!"

David Crowe—President, Cellular Networking Perspectives Ltd.

"I first learned about FrameMaker when it was adopted for converting large telecommunications standards from Word. Our choice to go with FrameMaker rather than continuing with Word has proved to be very smart (although I can't claim responsibility). By comparison, Microsoft Word documents don't look nearly as good, because you can't use styles because they have too many bugs. Consequently people manually apply formatting, and the documents look unprofessional, or they throw legions of typists at the documents in order to create consistency through brute force. Not only that, Word documents have trouble with figures created on other computers (even when created in Word), complex tables quickly become unmanageable, the application thinks it is smarter than you, and it crashes frequently.

FrameMaker, on the other hand, is as solid as a rock, even running under Mac OS 9. This includes all its important capabilities, such as styles, variables, cross references and conditional text. They work the vast majority of the time, bugs are few and fairly obvious when encountered. FrameMaker has real character styles, highly flexible auto-numbering and excellent search capabilities. Its drawing package is fully integrated, allowing the application of styles to text and tables within figures, insertion of tables, and seamless searches through text whether in figures or not.

Not only have I worked on telecom standards that are thousands of pages long, I have published three different newsletters using FrameMaker and do much small work in it as well, including correspondence.

My biggest complaint about FrameMaker is that it doesn't run natively under Mac OS X. I'm not going to use a Windows machine, and can continue to run Classic, but if a Mac OS X version came out tomorrow, I'd buy it tomorrow.

Another big problem with FrameMaker is its marketing by Adobe (well, its lack of marketing). I don't think I've ever seen an advertisement for the product, even though it's the world's best document processor. With a fresh new user interface, and all the capabilities of Mac OS X, FrameMaker could once again lead the world in sales, as well as capabilities. My opinion is that if Adobe isn't interested, they should do the decent thing and sell the product to another company that is more focused on text rather than graphics.

I plan to start writing a book in about a year. And, of course, I'll be using FrameMaker. Adobe has a choice, they can let me do it in FrameMaker on Mac OS 9 and get no money from me. Or they can provide an Mac OS X upgrade and take my money (and my wife's money, because she is already writing a book in FrameMaker and would also benefit from an Mac OS X upgrade)."

David Crowe - President, Cellular Networking Perspectives Ltd.; CFO and Newsletter Editor, Green Party of Alberta; Chairman, Telecommunications Industry Association subcommittee TR-45.2; Chairman, 3GPP2 Technical Specification Group TSG-X ERA Working Group (Evolution, Requirements and Architecture); Editor, TIA industry standards J-STD-036, IS-93, TSB-29 (all in FrameMaker); Editor, 3GPP2 specifications X.S0003, X.S0006, X.S00008 (all in FrameMaker)

Ian F. Darwin—Writer (O'Reilly), Instructor, and Programmer

"In refusing to develop a version of FrameMaker for OS X, Adobe has taken a major step away from its long-held corporate value of cross-platform support. I have used FrameMaker since the days of Frame 3.0, and even wrote glowing reviews in print of other Adobe cross-platform software (at a time when they offered Photoshop and Illustrator on Solaris). I would prefer not to have to use anything other than FrameMaker for textual books such as my 800-page Java Cookbook (O'Reilly, 2004, see http://javacook.darwinsys.com/). But if Adobe continue to withhold support for Frame from OS X users, I will take that as a hint and I will go elsewhere, as will many, many other authors.

What's really galling is that they claim to have made this decision because of lacklustre FrameMaker sales in the Mac area. But that lack of sales can be blamed squarely on Adobe's own decision never to bring Framemaker into the modern OS X era. They've had since before the year 2000 to do so, and have never done it. I presume they use some kind of user-interface generation toolkit (and if they don't, sell your Adobe shares--fast!), from which they could have generated a Carbon or Cocoa interface. They could even have done a lesser port of the X11-based user interface to run on OS X. Many people, myself included, held off upgrading our copies of Frame until Adobe upgraded their offering. They didn't, so we didn't. As it says on The Simpsons, "Doh!!"

William L Fithen—CERT, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

"I have been a Mac user since System 1.0. I have a Windows machine, but rarely use it. The productivity associated with Mac vs Windows has always been overwhelmingly compelling. Windows has always been a poor reproduction of Mac OS. I work in an extremely heterogeneous environment, by design. The nature of our job necessitates that no platform can be allowed to dominate. I am one of about 1/3 of our staff that has chosen Mac OS X over Windows XP. For that 1/3, FrameMaker on Windows is not an acceptable work environment. Therefore, we depend on poor substitutes. I have tried virtually every document and word processor available for Mac OS X. Some have interesting features, some have greater reliability than Word, some are poor ports of X-based document processors that lack the OS X interface or its robustness. All in all, I'd take FrameMaker over all of those."

Aviva Garrett—Director, Technical Publications, Juniper Networks

"I first looked at FrameMaker in the late 1980s, when it was available only on Sun systems. We couldn't afford the hardware at the time. When FrameMaker came out for the Mac (in 1990, I believe; version 2.1), I immediately bought it and have been using it ever since. It is really the only comprehensive book-writing software. I have worked at a series of networking companies, including Juniper Networks, where I started the Technical Publications group in 1997, and Cisco, where I worked in the IOS documentation group. I have used FrameMaker on PCs, Macintoshes, and UNIX (Solaris) systems, and have come to depend on having it run on all three platforms. (Currently, we use it on PCs and UNIX. We use fmbatch to run scripts on the UNIX side.) At home, I have a Macintosh and would like to be able to use it to access my work files. Also, I would like to be able to use FrameMaker on my Mac for any personal writing projects. There really isn't any other decent book-publishing tool out there except for FrameMaker."

Mark Greenberg—Neurosurgeon, Author of The Handbook of Neurosurgery, produced entirely with Mac FrameMaker

"FrameMaker is THE only page layout software capable of handling the demands of long, technical documents. Why? FrameMaker is unique in its ability to manage, multichapter texts with anchored frames, master pages, separately maintained autonumbering of figures, tables, and complex equations, together with automatic (hyperlinked) cross-references and indices. Conditional text permits customized versions for different audiences. All this is combined with cross-platform compatibility and the ability to format text in html.
With Apple's announced impending switch to Intel chips, support for System 9 will end, and so will the ability to use FrameMaker on the Mac, unless an OS X version is developed."

Richard Larson, Ph.D.—Professor of Linguistics, Stony Brook University

"I have used FrameMaker since the early 1990s when it became available for the NeXT workstation. I was developing educational software for the NeXT computer, and FrameMaker quickly became the application of choice for all of us in the NeXT community writing software manuals and pursuing book projects.

The reasons for its popularity were obvious. FrameMaker seamlessly incorporates text and graphics. It's organizational structure for book-length documents with chapter structure is both intuitive and very powerful. Furthermore, its modular nature made later revisions very easy. Finally, the cross-platform availability of the application, where files could be moved perfectly from NeXT to Sun to Windows allowed for wonderful collaborative ventures.

The manuals for the educational applications I co-developed for NeXT, Syntactica and Semantica, were both prepared camera ready in FrameMaker and both published by MIT Press. Syntactica and Semantica were recognized by an award through Educom/Educause in 1998, at which time the decision was made to port them to JAVA. Once again, the wonderful organization of FrameMaker made preparation of the new manuals very simple. All that was necessary was to produce new screen shots and drop them into the old graphics folders; Framemaker did the rest. These new manuals will be published in early 2006.

Most recently, I am in the process of completing a long term undergrad textbook project, also for MIT Press. This book, GRAMMAR AS SCIENCE, is the culmination of a National Science Foundation funded science education project and will (hopefully) be used in college classrooms throughout the country. It features an innovative use of graphics that were designed by Dr. Kimiko Ryokai, a recent PhD graduate of the MIT Media Lab. Our application choice for developing the book was FrameMaker, for all of the reasons given above. Indeed, one of the reasons the joint project worked so well was the cross-platform availability of FrameMaker. I use the Mac OS operating system. Dr. Ryokai uses Windows. Nonetheless, exchange of text and graphics over the Internet was flawless across the two thanks to FrameMaker.

It has always seemed to me (and still does so now) that the Mac is a natural platform for FrameMaker on its own. My early work with FrameMaker made frequent use of PostScript, the core imaging model for NeXT and a favored format for publishers. The Mac OS has excellent tools for handling PostScript and PDF, making it very easy to use with FrameMaker in an academic publishing context. Furthermore, the Mac OS remains very popular in the publishing and graphic design industry, so the applications that can be used in conjunction with FrameMaker in preparing a text are very rich. But it's also clear that one of the terrific selling points of FrameMaker is its cross-platform availability. Academic projects, including book length projects, are very frequently collaborative these days. Although many word-processing programs claim cross-platform uniformity, in my experience such claims are grossly exaggerated. FrameMaker is the one genuine exception. Given this strength, it would seem to me a very wise and imminently practical decision on Adobe's part to make FrameMaker available on as broad a spectrum of platforms as possible, and to highlight this virtue in its advertising. For all these reasons, FrameMaker on the Mac OS seems to me an absolute necessity for the long-term future of the application. It's a wonderful application and deserves to be available in its most modern form on a wonderful operating system like Mac OS."

Torben Lauridsen—CEO, ROSEMANN & LAURIDSEN GMBH, Germany

"Our company specializes in technical documentation, and our customers are large corporations in the semiconductor, telecom equipment, and automotive industries. They all use FrameMaker. Since the founding of our company, we have had a distinguished competence in, and advantage from using FrameMaker in a mixed-platform environment of Sun UNIX, Macintosh, and Windows. We started out in 1991 with FrameMaker 2.1 for Mac and have gone through all incremental upgrades up to version 6.0.
I urge Adobe to protect our investment in know-how and software on the Mac platform - FrameMaker and all the other Adobe applications that we use. Macintosh has always been the preferred platform for FrameMaker users who understand the differences and can choose. Since Mac OS X 10.2 - the world's most capable, easy to use, malware-free, and robust operating system - the Mac platform has become the obvious choice, with the lowest cost of ownership and the highest productivity. Even those users who have chosen to stay with FrameMaker 5.5.6, running it in the Classic environment is far superior to running the Windows alternative. Adobe, please bring FrameMaker to Mac OS X - I'm convinced it would increase FrameMaker sales substantially."

Edward Lipsett—CEO, Intercom, Ltd., Japan

"As a multi-lingual, multi-platform translation and production service company, we must be able to to handle a wide range of customer file formats and output specifications. In the dark ages, when all software and formats were proprietary, FrameMaker stood out because it offered outstanding layout functionality across multiple hardware platforms. This was essential, and in many cases still is. It offers a wide range of functions not provided well or at all by other layout applications, and in particular has a host of useful features and functions for handling large technical documents. We do a lot of large technical documents, and many of our customers have extensive documentation already in FrameMaker."

"Until the advent of Windows 95, the Macintosh ruled in Japan, and it remains the primary platform in design and production, with the result that a significant portion of existing documentation exists on the Macintosh. Restricting future development of FrameMaker to only the Windows platform will seriously undermine the usefulness of these existing documentation resources, and force many of our clients to invest significant amounts of capital into new hardware, software, and training. Especially given that the majority of the source code is now highly portable between platforms, I strongly urge Adobe Systems to continue development for both Windows and *NIX (including Mac OS X) platforms."

Matt Neuburg—Author (O'Reilly, Take Control) and TiDBITS Contributor

"I've written three "Definitive Guide" books for O'Reilly & Associates directly in FrameMaker from start to finish - first draft right through to camera-ready copy - as well as several software manuals and some structured XML. Quite apart from being a brilliant XML editor, there's no other program remotely like it for organized formal documents: automatically numbered elements, cross-references, index, footnotes, typographical control, plus generation of top-notch printout, PDFs, and HTML. Yet lacking a Mac OS X version, many organizations I work for (such as Take Control, the ebook publishers) won't use it, even though Microsoft Word, the only alternative, is crashy, unreliable, and inadequate. Some of Frame's features work only on a computer that can actually start up into Mac OS 9 - Classic alone won't do; such machines won't be around forever, so my future looks bleak. Plus Frame's character and font management desperately needs to come into the 21st century and join the Unicode party. When it does, what a killer app FrameMaker for Mac OS X will be!"

Steve Rickaby—Managing Director, WordMongers, Ltd.

"I first encountered FrameMaker in the early 1990s, when recompiling a book on a Mac IIci was an excuse for a coffee break. Over the following couple of years I became aware that it had features and powers that were not available in any other software that ran on the Mac. This fact was not lost on others either: as my work moved from writing to include copy-editing and book production, authors of academic software textbook who wanted some control over the final appearance of their work were increasingly drafting and submitting in FrameMaker.

Over the past ten years I have brought some ten textbooks to publication using FrameMaker, as well as many manuals, reports and directories, and it has never let me down. But that's not all: it was well up to the task of publishing a client's library of a dozen or so user guides, with a global index, as fully hyperlinked PDFs on CD-ROM. It is a testament to the power and depth of the application that today I am still discovering new ways to use it. If Adobe fail to port FrameMaker to OS X, I suppose in the end I will have to consider running it on a PC, but should this happen, I will most certainly not cross-grade any of the other Adobe applications I use: the Mac platform is too good to abandon."

David L Rodriguez, PhD, (Stanford University)—Aerospace Engineer

"Simply put, FrameMaker is the only software available that is capable of creating technical papers of good quality. I wrote my entire PhD thesis and several technical papers with FrameMaker and the quality of the output was excellent. I have tried other word processors to write a simple 10-page technical paper, and the result was an absolute nightmare. The only other option for me now is to use the dinosaur known as LaTex."

Dr. Samuel M. Smith—President, Adept Systems Inc.

"Anyone who values personal productivity and has used both the Mac OS and Windows extensively as I have knows that using the Mac significantly increases productivity. I personally can't afford to switch to Windows for just for one program, especially if there is an adequate replacement on the Mac.

I have been using Framemaker on the Mac since 1991 and used it on Sun Unix for several years as well. The first document I wrote in Frame was my Ph.D. Dissertation. I have almost 15 years worth of documents in FrameMaker. But I would net out better to convert those documents to another program than to switch to Windows just to keep them in FrameMaker. I can't afford the security risk of using Windows for my critical corporate communications and documentation. My company had several Framemaker 6 licenses for both Mac and Windows. We standardized on Framemaker for corporate documentation because it was the best cross platform long document program available. Since Adobe did not port Framemaker 7 to OSX I decided to take a wait and see approach to upgrading to Framemaker 7 company wide. Now that Adobe has dropped support for Framemaker Mac I switched the windows users off from Framemaker and do not intend to buy anymore FrameMaker licenses Windows or Mac. In fact I am slowly migrating my company to be a Mac shop (we have been about 80% Windows and 20% Mac). The fact that OS X is based on Unix makes it an easy decision. Our accounting is moving to Mac. Our servers are now OS X based and the only new PCs we will ever buy will be for PCB board layout and some development work where there is not yet comparable OS X software."

Matthew Stecker—Chief Technology Officer, SmartServ

"SmartServ is a telecommunications company that uses Mac OS X as its primary productivity platform. For complex document editing and publishing, our choices are currently extremely limited. While we use a combination of Microsoft's Word and Apple's new Pages, neither of these packages adheres to the structured delineation between content and style that can be imposed by FrameMaker. Additionally, neither of these programs has the typographical sophistication to produce output that comes close to rivaling that of Frame.

Personally, I've been a FrameMaker user since 1990, and have used it to author and publish many important documents since that time. The lack of a native Mac OS X port really leaves us in a bind. We don't want to use Microsoft Word, because although it is a fine word processor, it is not a documentation publication system. Were FrameMaker for Mac OS X available to us, we would make an immediate purchase of at least 20 seats. It would also dramatically improve our corporate productivity and the quality of our document output. Frame - and more importantly, the design principles behind Frame - are a true gem. Today, most of the market doesn't understand what might make Frame better than Word. I suggest that this situation can be better addressed by more focused marketing and education. Adobe owns a better mousetrap in Frame, and it would be a shame to see it fade."

Paolo Tramannoni—Product Specialist and Technical Writer, Korg, Inc. and Contributor, Applicando (top selling Italian Mac magazine), Italy

"We at Korg are strongly committed to multi-platform collaboration. Our development teams around the world work in a mixed environment, with converging technologies developed under Mac, Linux, and Windows. Therefore, a multi-platform tech-writing tool is highly desirable. An absolute must. We cannot get rid of our Macs because it's one of the major platforms we use for making sounds, samples, arrangements, sequences, and Karma patterns. And all sorts of documentation.

Our writers and translators around the world (we have distributors in virtually every country) use FrameMaker on Mac and Windows. Most of them (probably due to their musical heritage) use Macs. We were waiting for a translation-only tool from Adobe, i.e., a scaled-down version of FrameMaker for word processing, without some of the page-layout functionality. But on the contrary, we've been forced to look for an alternative writing tool. Nothing currently matches Framemaker, but in a few years, we, and all our translators, will have to switch to a different tool."

Paul Wachowicz—Technical Writer, Nortel

"As a technical writer, I've used various publication software (initially ed and vi with nroff markup in UNIX, then MS Word beginning with version 01.04b, PageMaker, QuarkXPress, and Interleaf among others) over 23 years. I was first introduced to FrameMaker (for Mac) in 1993, and while it took some time to really appreciate what it could do, I'm now its unabashed biggest fan. I love this package, and nothing comes close to it: its ability to elegantly handle long documents, its support for structure and XML, its rich hypertext, cross-reference, and conditional text tools, its variable paradigm - it simply has no peer. Adobe suggests we move to InDesign, but this is a definite non-starter; its "out-of-box" feature set is simply sub-par, and to render it useful at all would mean spending several thousands of dollars on third-party plugins that may or may not do the job. Even then, much functionality I need (e.g., the ability to cross-reference in any meaningful way) is still not available at all. I bought InDesign with high hopes, and put it through its paces; with so much missing functionality, it's a no-go. I've completely abandoned it. And running FrameMaker in the Classic environment is really not an option; it's clumsy, all the resources I need (e.g., font sets) aren't necessarily available in Mac OS 9, and it's cumbersome. FrameMaker for Mac OS X is the only answer for me. While I use a PC and FrameMaker at work, I have no plans (in fact refuse) to abandon Apple at home. Loyalty and preference are still important to many of us, especially in the Mac community. Adobe would do well to understand this."

"I don't care what FrameMaker for Mac OS X, should Adobe finally do the right thing, costs. I really don't. I will be first in line to buy my copy. And Adobe will have regained some of the trust and respect they've lost from me."

Dr. Uwe R. Zimmer—Fellow, The Australian National University

"FrameMaker as the central publishing tool for technical writers has currently no direct competitors at all. At the same time, the Mac as an OS-platform is in a highly developed and in many ways advanced state. Dropping FrameMaker for the Mac now seems to be a very short-sighted decision to me.

The results might be that the large community - desperately seeking for an operational tool - will eventually split into several groups. There will be the "back to the 70s"- movement and revitalize LaTeX while turning their backs on Adobe - I know, I know, for somebody used to a state-of-the-art tool like FrameMaker this is like throwing away your development environment and start programming using a macro-assembler again. Sure these will be mainly the education and academic research people - meaning that this will also have effects on future students generations. Then there will be those who replace some main aspects of the original FrameMaker functionality by patching a selection of other tools together - that's an expensive as well as frustrating path, since there will always be frictions and delays in this process - just think of the hassles of using an external equation editor for one hundred-something equations in a short paper. The alternative of changing platforms just for one tool - even if it is a very essential one - will be "attractive" to a small group of people only. Groups which can afford the luxury might also consider to use FrameMaker remote via X-servers on Solaris platforms - still clumsy, but a possibility. Finally, there will be those who stick with the current FrameMaker on Mac OS 9 until it actually breaks for good and even then they might consider keeping an older platform around just for that purpose.

We considered all of the above alternatives in depth, and categorized them one-by-one as plain emergency scenarios. Assuming that Adobe will be offering (or even announcing) FrameMaker for Mac OS X any time soon, all the above plans will be wiped away in a split-second.

The number of technical writers on the Mac is probably not as large as the group of office-suite users, but it is a substantial group with quite a bit of impact, especially with respect to future student generations. It seems incomprehensible to slaughter this whole market based on some recent sales numbers. Adobe was able in the past to place thrilling and highly useful tools in diverse communities. To see Adobe beginning to follow the gradient of short-term accumulative sales charts would be very sad and unnecessary."