Re: Influencing Adobe on FrameMaker (why bother?)

[Larry Kollar <Larry.Kollar@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I guess my question is, if Adobe doesn't care that much, and viable
alternatives are beginning to appear, should we put our efforts into
"influencing" Adobe, or work with companies (or in open-source cases,
development teams) who *want* to work with us?

There are plenty of former contenders and might-have-beens out there --
Interleaf, Xyvision, Ventura just off the top of my head. If FrameMaker
joins them, it will happen only when the alternatives are truly viable.
Xyvision apparantly impaled itself on its proprietary-hardware model;
Ventura and Interleaf are still around but most of us here have reasons
for thinking FrameMaker is (for all its faults) a better product. I
suppose either one could rise from the ashes if their owners decided
to actively "go after" the FrameMaker client base.


Martin Anderson mentions LyX:

>[I] can't offer an opinion on it yet, it does look interesting
>on the face of it -- it supports sgml-tools, for example.
>(www.lyx.org)

I actually wrote a proposal to move our department to LyX on Linux
machines (it wasn't acted upon, but was seriously considered). There
are some holes in LyX's feature list -- the most glaring being cross-
references and SGML/XML round-trip -- but it's certainly more viable
than MS Word for long documents already.

LyX's advantage is its active and enthusiastic team of developers
and users. The user documentation is pretty good (or fantastic by
open-source standards), and accessible from the Help menu. While
the user base is mostly academic, LyX has a few commercial books
to its credit. Reading the example at www.postgresql.org --
<http://www.postgresql.org/docs/awbook.html> -- is giving me ideas
on how one could handle database publishing from an SQL database
using LyX....

	Larry



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