Core Dump 2.0

Adobe is soliciting feature requests for FrameMaker. This is the email that I sent:

Thanks for asking for feature requests for FrameMaker. I’m sure you’ll get swamped.

One feature that I would find useful is a relationship table builder for Unstructured FrameMaker. MadCap Flare has a similar feature. It would be quite handy for those of us not working in structured Frame/DITA.

I would also like to see the capability to set up, easily change, and save variables and conditional text settings across a book. Take a look at 36 Software’s SmartDocs (yes, I know it’s a Word tool), which has a feature called Snapshots. Basically, you set all the variable values and the show/hide settings for your conditional text the way you want it, then save the settings in a named configuration. You can then have multiple configurations and change them just by loading a previously saved snapshots. It’s an extremely useful feature that saves a lot of time.

Next, an outliner for unstructured Frame.

There’s one very basic feature that Word has had pretty much forever and I can’t understand why FrameMaker doesn’t have it – style inheritance. It would make template design much easier.

Frame’s indexing is ridiculously primitive. Typing markers into a puny little dialog box? Surely you can do something to make it easier. Perhaps you should just buy IXgen from FSATools and build it into Frame.

Finally, I’m sure you’ve seen it, but just in case you haven’t look at Tim Murray’s “My Frame Wish and Bug List”. See http://www.techknowledgecorp.com/help/help.html .  It hasn’t been updated since Frame 7, I think, but some of the items there are still open and valid.

For whatever reason, there are still a fair number of writers out there using FrameMaker 7. However, FrameMaker 7 has compatibility issues with Windows 7. Silicon Prairie Software has a free patch that will allow FrameMaker 7 to run under Windows 7.

This application uses a compatibility shim to control settings for the
FrameMaker 7.x executable file. A compatibility shim provides more control
over settings that allow the older version of Frame to work with Windows
7. I’ve used it for a few years, going back to the Windows Vista days. It
fixes the incompatibilities with the built-in compatibility modes, such as
the slowdown you experienced with the XP compatibility mode. (I had found
exactly the same behavior.)

I guess today is ExtendScript day.

Here’s a very useful script provided by Markus of Practice Innovation that lets you maintain a library of FrameMaker ExtendScripts in a central directory (a feature that FrameScript has had for years).  If you start using a lot of scripts, you’ll definitely want this.

If you want FrameMaker to load  ExtendScripts
automatically you need to be locate them in FrameMaker
startup directories. But what to do if you want to use
a central library which is stored on a server share?
You can add these scripts to FrameMaker's script
catalog by hand of course. But if you want to make
sure all users in your company have the complete
and current set of all your scripts, there's no easy
way to manage this.

So the first version of "Install Script In Folders"
is out now and it's for FREE!!!

Once you've installed this plugin (an easy to
use setup application is provided and also a
msi file) select the folder your scripts are located.
All the scripts are loaded in your FrameMaker
session everytime FrameMaker is started.

One of the major improvements to FrameMaker 10 was the addition of the ExtendScript scripting language that’s now common to many Adobe applications. It’s taken a while for the FrameMaker community to develop FrameMaker-specific scripts as Adobe was slow out of the gate with documentation, but that’s beginning to change. One good resource is Extending FrameMaker, a blog by Debra Herman.

This blog started in October and there are now dozens of posts explaining various aspects of ExtendScript and FrameMaker. It’s a must for FrameMaker power users.