Re: Creating & Applying Formats badness

[Dan Emory <danemory@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

What this report (below) from Ezra Steinberg re-confirms is that there's no
one in FrameMaker product development at Adobe who has any practical,
real-world experience with the product. It also confirms that there is no
rigorous testing of new features to determine whether the implementation
makes sense in actual practice, and also to determine whether a new feature
produces unintended and undesirable consequences.

Another evidence of this lack of practical experience is the PDF file bloat
produced by the creation of enormous numbers of useless named destinations.
In an FM+SGML structured document, for example, only certain elements have
ID attributes, and these are the only ones which need named destinations in
the PDF output. Yet, this fact seems to be ignored when FM+SGML produces PDF
output from a structured document.

The botched new features, bugs and instability problems that have been
evident from the beginning in the V5.5 release fiasco have reached such a
magnitude that the major license holders ought to get together and inform
Adobe that:

1. They will, as a bloc, refuse to upgrade to the next major release unless:

        a. Adobe, prior to that new release, issues a new 5.5.x release that
cleans up all of the outstanding problems

        b. Adobe also agrees to items 2 thru 4 below

2. Adobe must submit for their review a comprehensive test plan for the next
major release to demonstrate that:

        a. Rigorous pre- and post-Beta testing shall be performed that
includes participation by Adobe testers whose resumes demonstrate that they
have substantial experience in using the product in a real-world
publications environment.

        b. The pre- and post-Beta testing phases shall include testing on
all platforms of the product's stability over a wide range of real-world
situations and document types.

        c. Ample time is provided between the Beta release and the actual
product release so that discrepancies found by the Beta testers will be
corrected in the final product release.

        d. The results of the testing described in a, b, and c above shall
be available for review by the major license holders no later than the time
the new product release becomes available.

3. Adobe must submit for their review a documentation plan that describes
how the on-line and printed documentation for the new release will be
improved to eliminate the vast shortcomings of the 5.5 documentation.
    
At 11:18 PM 3/1/99 -0800, Ezra Steinberg wrote:
>FEATURE : File -> Utilities -> Create and Apply Formats
>PLATFORM: FrameMaker 5.5.3 on Solaris 2.5.1
>PROBLEM : Character formats added when not desired
>
>DISCUSSION:
>In an attempt to clean up an old book, I followed a suggestion I read
>somewhere to delete all the tags in the paragraph and character catalogs,
>then use Create & Apply Formats on all the chapters of the book to create
>a "clean" set of tags (including new tags for the old ones that had
>overrides).
>
>What I discovered is that this feature also creates and applies character
>tags as well as paragraph tags. I'm not sure what algorithm is used,
>but the result is that a heading that is bold (for example) is assigned
>a paragraph tag with all the appropriate attributes except for character
>attributes (such as "bold") and then is assigned a character tag with
>the "bold" attribute.
>------------------------------Snip
     ____________________
     | Nullius in Verba |
     ********************
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory@primenet.com
10044 Adams Ave. #208, Huntington Beach, CA 92646
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