VERDICT: Improved handling of single-source repurposing and new support for rich media and Unicode – but Framemaker is still crying out for a core overhaul.

Framemaker was one of the first DTP packages and this year celebrates its 21st birthday...

That’s a significant achievement and a testament to Framemaker’s great strength: where programs like PageMaker provided hands-on design power designed to mimic traditional cut-and-paste layout, Framemaker has always taken a more holistic tag-based approach that massively boosts productivity when dealing with longer, more technical documents. Back in 1996, recognising the value of this system, Adobe bought the company and the future looked bright. However, when Adobe shifted its focus onto InDesign, development virtually ground to a halt. With over five years passed since the underwhelming version 7 release, it began to look as if Framemaker might have been deemed surplus to requirements.
Not at all, according to Adobe, which claims this latest release is the most significant and exciting since it took over. So what’s new? Text handling is clearly central to Framemaker but, without a dedicated story editor view, it’s still often preferable to begin authoring documents in a word processor so the new support for Word 2007 (and Excel 2007) files is welcome. Even more so is Framemaker’s belated new Unicode support for all import, export and internal processing which, along with new international dictionaries, makes it possible to produce documentation in multiple languages.
Framemaker 8 also adds new options for tracking edits with colour coding of added and deleted text. You can also jump from edit to edit, approving or rejecting as you go though certain actions still aren’t tracked and the handling is hardly state-of-the-art. Rather more impressive is Framemaker’s longstanding ability to manage multiple versions, say translations, of a single document by using conditional text. This process has been enhanced by the addition of a new Manage Condition Tag dialog, new colour coding capabilities and the ability to generate conditional output based on Boolean expressions.

Framemaker’s support for handling multiple versions of the same document has been improved

Hands-on conditional text handling is fine for ad-hoc document variations, but Framemaker really comes into its own when handling the repurposing of rigidly-structured documents for which it offers a dedicated working environment with additional power. In particular when single-sourcing multiple documents, you can now filter structured documents based on attribute values using complex Boolean expressions which can be saved and re-used. Framemaker 8 also adds new support for DITA (Darwin Information Typing Architecture) which breaks down a publishing project into re-usable modular topics brought together by maps – well suited for working on complex jobs such as encyclopaedias and help files.