Future of FrameMaker: InDesign? [Long]

["Rick Quatro" <rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Background: Last year, I used FrameMaker to typeset an entire King James
Bible. Frame's running header/footers and book features were extremely
helpful, but the text required a lot of manual adjustment to get good
character and word spacing, and to control widows and orphans. Drop caps at
the beginning of each chapter required considerable work. I had to print
from Macintosh FrameMaker because the Windows version doesn't support
ligatures.

This year, I am typesetting a Spanish Bible, as well as an English/Spanish
Bible with each language in parallel columns. I have been taking a hard look
at InDesign, mainly because of its claims to an advanced, multi-line type
composition engine. In using the Tryout Version, I found that the text
control is indeed excellent. InDesign gives a lot of attention to
typography; for details, see
http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/pdfs/idsn15typography.pdf.

Working with InDesign gives me a sense of what the interface of a modern
page layout program should be. Unlimited undos, ruler guides, oversized
pasteboard, application- and document-level defaults, layers, native support
for Illustrator, Photoshop and PDF, Unicode, paragraph rules, etc.

I had honestly hoped that FrameMaker would be "modernized" in Version 6.
Frame 6, with the exception of book handling, is pretty much a repackaging
of 5.5.6; in short, it is a major disappointment. I think it's a foregone
conclusion that FrameMaker will never receive the development it needs to
achieve parity with Adobe's mainstream applications. Even in the areas of
traditional FrameMaker strength, it is beginning to fall behind. Scripts and
plugins can only go so far, because of FrameMaker's "outdated code base."

Of course, FrameMaker still has features that InDesign and others don't have
(integrated tables, autonumbering, running header/footers, run-in heads,
etc.). But, reading this InDesign article about Architecture and
Extensibility
(http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/pdfs/idsn15architecture.pdf) has
made me consider the future of both products, and guess at Adobe's strategy.

If InDesign truly has a modern, object-oriented architecture, perhaps it's
easier and more cost-effective to add FrameMaker-like features to InDesign,
than to overhaul FrameMaker's code base. After doing some research on
InDesign's Software Developers Kit (SDK), this seems like it could be a
reasonable strategy. There is no question that InDesign was created with
extensibility in mind.

For the record: I wish that FrameMaker's future was as bright as it once
seemed. Ironically, it was Adobe's purchase of Frame that made me believe
that FrameMaker would be propelled to the front of the page layout pack.
But, reality has rapidly set in. Regardless of Adobe's spin on FrameMaker
(Warnock, et. al.), Frame 6 confirms the classic saying, "actions speak
louder than words." Quark's development of XML import/export capability
shows that other guys are not going to stand still. My clients are not as
loyal to FrameMaker as I am, which means that they are looking elsewhere for
solutions also.

Questions for Adobe and developers: What is the feasibility of adding some
long-document capabilities to InDesign? Are there any plans for doing so? Is
it reasonable or realistic to take the best features of FrameMaker and add
them to InDesign, perhaps as a set of "Long-Document Plugins"? Are there any
developers working on plugins for InDesign that might make it worth the
switch, at least for some documents?

Fellow Framers: In this post, I am basically "thinking out loud." One thing
I learned when I was in the thick of the Macintosh/Windows wars: I had to
determine if it was more important to defend the Mac platform to the end, or
to stay in business and serve my clients. I chose the latter. Do I stay with
Frame to the end, or do I try to provide the best publishing solutions for
my clients? I want to do both, but the future is requiring me to start
looking beyond FrameMaker.

I am interested in your feedback. To start with, I would like to compile a
list of indispensible Frame features. Thanks.

Rick Quatro
Carmen Publishing
716 659-8267
rick@frameexpert.com
http://www.frameexpert.com


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