Adobe FrameMaker is a

document processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current ...

designed for writing and editing large or complex documents, including structured documents. It was originally developed by Frame Technology Corporation, which was bought by

Adobe Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for '' mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of ...

Overview

FrameMaker became an Adobe product in October 1995 when Adobe purchased Frame Technology Corp. Adobe added

SGML The Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML; ISO 8879:1986) is a standard for defining generalized markup languages for documents. ISO 8879 Annex A.1 states that generalized markup is "based on two postulates": * Declarative: Markup should ...

support, which eventually morphed into today's XML support. In April 2004, Adobe stopped supporting FrameMaker for the

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...

. This reinvigorated rumors surfacing in 2001 that product development and support for FrameMaker were being wound down. Adobe denied these rumors in 2001, later releasing FrameMaker 8 at the end of July 2007, FrameMaker 9 in 2009, FrameMaker 10 in 2011, FrameMaker 11 in 2012, FrameMaker 12 in 2014, FrameMaker (2015 release) in June 2015, FrameMaker 2017 in January 2017, FrameMaker 2019 in August 2018, and FrameMaker 2020 in 2020. FrameMaker has two ways of approaching documents:

structured Structuring, also known as smurfing in banking jargon, is the practice of executing financial transactions such as making bank deposits in a specific pattern, calculated to avoid triggering financial institutions to file reports required by law ...

and unstructured. * Structured FrameMaker is used to achieve consistency in documentation within industries such as aerospace, where several models of the same complex product exist, or pharmaceuticals, where translation and standardization are important requirements in communications about products. Structured FrameMaker uses

and

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable. T ...

concepts. The author works with an EDD ( Element Definition Document), which is a FrameMaker-specific DTD (

Document Type Definition A document type definition (DTD) is a set of ''markup declarations'' that define a ''document type'' for an SGML-family markup language ( GML, SGML, XML, HTML). A DTD defines the valid building blocks of an XML document. It defines the document s ...

). The EDD defines the structure of a document where meaningful units are designated as ''elements'' nested in each other depending on their relationships, and where the formatting of these elements is based on their contexts. Attributes or

Metadata Metadata is "data that provides information about other data", but not the content of the data, such as the text of a message or the image itself. There are many distinct types of metadata, including: * Descriptive metadata – the descriptive ...

can be added to these elements and used for single source publishing or for filtering elements during the output processes (such as publishing for print or for Web-based display). The author can view the conditions and contexts in a tree-like structure derived from the

grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes doma ...

(as specified by the DTD) or as formatted in a typical final output form. * Unstructured FrameMaker uses tagged paragraphs without any imposed logical structure, except that expressed by the author’s concept, topic organization, and the formatting supplied by paragraph tags. When a user opens a structured file in unstructured FrameMaker, the structure is lost.

MIF

MIF (Maker Interchange Format) is a markup language that functions as a companion to FrameMaker. MIF always had 3 purposes. The first was to represent FrameMaker documents in a relatively simple

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because ...

-based format, which can be produced or understood by other software systems and also by humans. The second was to ensure any version of FrameMaker could read a document produced by any other version, at least to the extent it had the same features. While every version of FrameMaker could read the last couple of version's documents, reading them all took too much software effort and testing, so reading MIF was sufficient. The third was to ensure that FrameMaker would never lose a writer's work. If FrameMaker crashed, it would first write out the current document in MIF. Any document that can be created interactively in FrameMaker can also be represented, exactly and completely, in MIF (the reverse, however, is not true: a few FrameMaker features are available only through MIF). All versions of FrameMaker can export documents in MIF, and can also read MIF documents, including documents created by an earlier version or by another program.

History

While working on his master's degree in

astrophysics Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the h ...

Columbia University Columbia University (also known as Columbia, and officially as Columbia University in the City of New York) is a private research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhatt ...

, Charles "Nick" Corfield, a mathematician alumnus of the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

, decided to write a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

document editor on a

Sun-2 The Sun-2 series of UNIX workstations and servers was launched by Sun Microsystems in November 1983. As the name suggests, the Sun-2 represented the second generation of Sun systems, superseding the original Sun-1 series. The Sun-2 series used a 10 ...

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating systems. The term ''workst ...

. He got the idea from his college roommate at Columbia, Ben Meiry, who went to work at

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, t ...

as a technical consultant and writer, and saw that there was a market for a powerful and flexible

desktop publishing Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online ...

(DTP) product for the professional market. The only substantial DTP product at the time of FrameMaker's conception was

Interleaf Interleaf, Inc., was a company that created computer software products for the technical publishing creation and distribution process. Founded in 1981, its initial product was the first commercial document processor that integrated text and graph ...

, which also ran on Sun workstations in 1981. Meiry saw an opportunity for a product to compete with Interleaf, enlisted Corfield to program it, and assisted him in acquiring the hardware, software, and technical connections to get him going in his Columbia University dorm room (where Corfield was still finishing his degree). Corfield programmed his algorithms quickly. After only a few months, Corfield had completed a functional prototype of FrameMaker. The prototype caught the eyes of salesmen at the fledgling Sun Microsystems, which lacked commercial applications to showcase the graphics capabilities of their workstations. They got permission from Corfield to use the prototype as

demoware Shareware is a type of proprietary software that is initially shared by the owner for trial use at little or no cost. Often the software has limited functionality or incomplete documentation until the user sends payment to the software developer ...

for their computers, and hence, the primitive FrameMaker received plenty of exposure in the

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, ...

workstation arena.

Steve Kirsch Steven Todd Kirsch is an American entrepreneur. He has started several companies and was one of two people who independently invented the optical mouse. Kirsch has been both a philanthropic supporter of medical research, and a promoter of misi ...

saw the demo and realized the potential of the product. Kirsch used the money he earned from

Mouse Systems Mouse Systems Corporation (MSC), formerly Rodent Associates, was founded in 1982 by Steve Kirsch. The company was responsible for bringing the mouse to the IBM PC for the first time. History Mouse Systems' optical mouse, wired to a Sun workstat ...

to fund a startup company, Frame Technology Corp., to commercialize the software. Corfield chose to sue Meiry for release of rights to the software so they could more easily obtain additional investment capital with Kirsch. Meiry had little means to fight a lengthy and expensive lawsuit with Corfield and his new business partners, and he chose to relinquish his rights to FrameMaker and move on. Originally written for

SunOS SunOS is a Unix-branded operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstation and server computer systems. The ''SunOS'' name is usually only used to refer to versions 1.0 to 4.1.4, which were based on BSD, while versions 5.0 an ...

(a variant of UNIX) on Sun machines, FrameMaker was a popular technical writing tool, and the company was profitable early on. Because of the flourishing desktop publishing market on the

Apple Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software ...

, the software was ported to the Mac as its second platform. In the early 1990s, a wave of UNIX workstation vendors—

Apollo Apollo, grc, Ἀπόλλωνος, Apóllōnos, label=genitive , ; , grc-dor, Ἀπέλλων, Apéllōn, ; grc, Ἀπείλων, Apeílōn, label=Arcadocypriot Greek, ; grc-aeo, Ἄπλουν, Áploun, la, Apollō, la, Apollinis, label= ...

Data General Data General Corporation was one of the first minicomputer firms of the late 1960s. Three of the four founders were former employees of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Their first product, 1969's Data General Nova, was a 16-bit minicompute ...

, MIPS,

Motorola Motorola, Inc. () was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, United States. After having lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009, the company split into two independent public companies, Motorola ...

and

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

—provided funding to Frame Technology for an OEM version for their platforms. At the height of its success, FrameMaker ran on more than thirteen UNIX platforms, including

NeXT Computer NeXT Computer (also called the NeXT Computer System) is a workstation computer that was developed, marketed, and sold by NeXT Inc. It was introduced in October 1988 as the company's first and flagship product, at a price of , aimed at the hig ...

NeXTSTEP NeXTSTEP is a discontinued object-oriented, multitasking operating system based on the Mach kernel and the UNIX-derived BSD. It was developed by NeXT Computer in the late 1980s and early 1990s and was initially used for its range of propri ...

Dell Dell is an American based technology company. It develops, sells, repairs, and supports computers and related products and services. Dell is owned by its parent company, Dell Technologies. Dell sells personal computers (PCs), servers, data ...

's System V Release 4 UNIX and IBM's

AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *An Alternate Index, for a Virtual Storage Access Method Key Sequenced Data Set * Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belgiu ...

operating systems. Sun Microsystems and

AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile ...

were promoting the OPEN LOOK

GUI The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, inste ...

standard to win over Motif, so Sun contracted Frame Technology to implement a version of FrameMaker on their

PostScript PostScript (PS) is a page description language in the electronic publishing and desktop publishing realm. It is a dynamically typed, concatenative programming language. It was created at Adobe Systems by John Warnock, Charles Geschke, Do ...

-based

NeWS News is information about current events. This may be provided through many different media: word of mouth, printing, postal systems, broadcasting, electronic communication, or through the testimony of observers and witnesses to event ...

windowing system. The NeWS version of FrameMaker was successfully released to those customers adopting the OPEN LOOK standards. At this point, FrameMaker was considered an extraordinary product for its day, not only enabling authors to produce highly structured documents with relative ease, but also giving users a great deal of typographical control in a reasonably intuitive and totally WYSIWYG way. The output documents could be of very high typographical quality. Frame Technology later ported FrameMaker to

Microsoft Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

, but the company lost direction soon after its release. Up to this point, FrameMaker had been targeting a professional market for highly technical publications, such as the maintenance manuals for the

Boeing 777 The Boeing 777, commonly referred to as the Triple Seven, is an American long-range wide-body airliner developed and manufactured by Boeing Commercial Airplanes. It is the world's largest twinjet. The 777 was designed to bridge the gap betw ...

project, and licensed each copy for $2,500. But the Windows version brought the product to the $500 price range, which cannibalized its own non-Windows customer base. The company's attempt to sell sophisticated technical publishing software to the home DTP market was a disaster. A tool designed for a 1,000-page manual was too cumbersome and difficult for an average home user to type a one-page letter. And despite some initially enthusiastic users, FrameMaker never really took off in the academic market, because of the company's unwillingness to incorporate various functions (such as support for endnotes or long footnotes split across pages), or to improve the equation editor. Sales plummeted and brought the company to the verge of

bankruptcy Bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. In most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debto ...

. After several rounds of layoffs, the company was stripped to the bare bones.

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the cre ...

acquired the product and returned the focus to the professional market. Then, they released a new version under the name Adobe FrameMaker 5.1 in 1996. Today, Adobe FrameMaker is still a widely used publication tool for technical writers, although no version has been released for the

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lap ...

operating system, limiting use of the product. The decision to cancel FrameMaker caused considerable friction between Adobe and Mac users, including Apple itself, which relied on it for creating documentation. As late as 2008, Apple manuals for

OS X Leopard Mac OS X Leopard (version 10.5) is the sixth major release of macOS, Apple's desktop and server operating system for Macintosh computers. Leopard was released on October 26, 2007 as the successor of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, and is available in ...

and the iPhone were still being developed on FrameMaker 7 in Classic mode; Apple has since switched to using

InDesign Adobe InDesign is a desktop publishing and page layout designing software application produced by Adobe Inc. and first released in 1999. It can be used to create works such as posters, flyers, brochures, magazines, newspapers, presentations, bo ...

. FrameMaker versions 5.x through 7.2 (from mid-1995 to 2005) did not contain updates to major parts of the program (including its general user interface, table editing, and illustration editing), concentrating instead on bug fixes and the integration of XML-oriented features (previously part of the FrameMaker+

premium product). FrameMaker did not feature multiple undo until version 7.2 (its 2005 release). FrameMaker 8 (2007) introduced

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

, Flash, 3D, and built-in DITA support. Platform support included Windows (2000, XP, and Vista) and Sun Solaris (8, 9, and 10). FrameMaker 9 (2009) introduced a redesigned user interface and several enhancements, including: full support for DITA, support for more media types, better PDF output, and enhanced WebDAV-based

CMS CMS may refer to: Computing * Call management system * CMS-2 (programming language), used by the United States Navy * Code Morphing Software, a technology used by Transmeta * Collection management system for a museum collection * Color manage ...

integration. Platform support for Sun Solaris and Windows 2000 was dropped, leaving Windows XP and Windows Vista as the sole remaining platforms. FrameMaker 10 (2011) again refined the user interface and introduced several changes, including: integration with content management systems via EMC Documentum 6.5 with Service Pack 1 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 with Service Pack 2.

Other FrameMaker tools

* FrameMaker Publishing Server is an online

server for automated creation of multi-use content types. The web interface enables users to direct aggregation of differing information sources routinely into detailed a presentation in multiple environments on numerous devices.

Alternatives and competition

There were several major competitors in the technical publishing market, such as Arbortext,

, and

Corel Ventura Ventura Publisher was the first popular desktop publishing package for IBM PC compatible computers running the GEM extension to the DOS operating system. The software was originally developed by Ventura Software, a small software company founde ...

. Many academic users now use

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

, because modern editors have made that system increasingly user-friendly, and LyX allows LaTeX to be generated with little or no knowledge of LaTeX. Several formats, including

DocBook DocBook is a semantic markup language for technical documentation. It was originally intended for writing technical documents related to computer hardware and software, but it can be used for any other sort of documentation. As a semantic languag ...

XML, target authors of technical documents about computer hardware and software. Lastly, alternatives to FrameMaker for technical writing include Help authoring tools and

XML editor An XML editor is a markup language editor with added functionality to facilitate the editing of XML. This can be done using a plain text editor, with all the code visible, but XML editors have added facilities like tag completion and menus and but ...

s. Also,

Scribus Scribus () is free and open-source desktop publishing (DTP) software available for most desktop operating systems. It is designed for layout, typesetting, and preparation of files for professional-quality image-setting equipment. Scribus can a ...

is an

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized so ...

desktop publishing alternative.

References

External links

Adobe FrameMaker Official Page
*Blog post abou

Using Element Descriptions to cut down writers’ training costs and efforts.
FrameUsers.com
FrameMaker users' largest online reference site and community
History of FrameMaker

Adobe FrameMaker Online Forum
{{Adobe Systems 1986 software FrameMaker Desktop publishing software IRIX software NeXTSTEP software Solaris software Technical communication tools Text editors Typesetting software XML XML editors XML software