Re: Adobe FrameMaker End-of-Life for Macintosh Platform

[Dov Isaacs <isaacs@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 3/23/2004 11:41 AM, Larry.Kollar@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>> I think Mac FrameMaker is a niche version of a niche product. Adobe has
>> bigger issues to deal with and will be more than happy to collect a bit 
>of
>> extra revenue from FM, as long as it doesn't take away from the more
>> important things - like making PDF as the one-size-fits-all binary file
>> format for everything in the software universe.
>
>File this one under "silly conspiracy theory" if you like; I really
>don't believe this is what's happening myself. Howe'er it is, it
>almost seems as if Apple is deliberately provoking Adobe lately. First
>there was the purchase and subsequent popularization of Final Cut Pro
>(and later the cut-back Express), which competes more with Media 100
>and Avid in functionality but simply blows Premiere out of the water
>for about $200 more. No surprise, Adobe dropped the MacOS version of
>Premiere.
>
>Panther, aka OSX 10.3, has a PDF reader that rivals Acrobat Reader in
>capability, and is faster than even Reader 5 (I've seen dead snails
>move faster than Reader 6). It also includes GhostScript, which provides
>what Apple calls a "command-line distiller" (ps2pdf). Thus, you can
>display and even create PDFs on OSX without having a single piece of
>Adobe software installed. (Again, this is a silly conspiracy theory)
>Then Adobe retaliates by dropping the only long-document publishing
>program that runs on MacOS.
>
>The logical next step by Apple is to include PDF *editing* capability,
>a la Acrobat, in OSX 10.4. Frankly, I expect to see something like
>that happen before I see an InDesign Technical Publishing Solution. :-)
>
>--
>Larry Kollar, Senior Technical Writer, ARRIS


Larry,

File it all the way into "silly conspiracy theory" because not only is
it way off base, but some of the "facts" you quote are somewhat 
"problematic" at best.

(1) There is absolutely no correlation between any of the decisions
associated with FrameMaker on the Macintosh and anything Apple is
doing or not doing with regards to application programs they are
developing and marketing.

(2) With regards to Apples "PDF viewer", the reason it is so fast is
that (a) it doesn't support the full PDF 1.5 specification and (b) the
program doesn't need to support a full programming and support API
including support for security, forms, annotation, preflighting,
color management and softproofing, and on and on and on. If you
hack up Acrobat or Adobe Reader to take away all the plug-ins that
provide functionality that Apple doesn't support in its lightweight
reader, they load and process very quickly as well. (For what it is
worth, one of the goals of the next version of Acrobat is to do
whatever is possible to cut down dramatically on program startup time
for both Acrobat and Reader. We had such a program in place for
InDesign for the last release and the difference is night and day!)

(3) Do YOU really know what is underneath "ps2pdf"? You obviously
don't if you mentioned GhostScript! Because it isn't GhostScript!
It is Adobe's PDF Normalizer licensed from Adobe. It is a specially
configured OEM version of Distiller. So in fact, your MacOS X 10.3
system does INDEED come with very critical Adobe PDF technology 
directly licensed from Adobe. And you are absolutely wrong about
creating PDF from PostScript under MacOS X 10.3 "without a single
piece of Adobe software installed." It is preinstalled for you!

        - Dov


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