RE: Re : OS X (was Re: Windows ME)

["Erica Chapin" <erica.chapin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you for your sanity! By the way, your English may not be 'perfect' but
your meaning is perfectly clear  - that's what matters.  Erica Chapin, a new
user of FM - no fancy GUI please!

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-framers@omsys.com [mailto:owner-framers@omsys.com]On Behalf Of
Despot
Sent: Wednesday, October 04, 2000 14:19
To: Bill Briggs; Free Framers
Subject: Re : OS X (was Re: Windows ME)

(Beware : long study.)

Bill Briggs wrote :

> I can think of lots of things that would be a lot higher priority than the
> UI overhaul. I'm betting most users are of similar mind.

Apologising at once for my bad English, I dare add a few words to this
interesting thread about the core values and lacks of FrameMaker. I have no
deep
programming knowledge, but a serious bit of practical experience.

In our french-speaking part of Europe, and our business (fine book
publishing),
FM is simply unknown. I had the idea to try it when we had complicated
essays to
layout, with footnotes, indexes, etc. Most publishing offices do it in
XPress
when they care about how their pages will look, and have time to spend. Many
others are too snob to admit it, but they simply do their books with MSWord.
Here it takes time, too, but it also looks ugly.

We have a very small team for a huge editing job : about 120 books a year.
As it
is mostly fine literature and non-conformistic essays, without public or
private
funds, we cannot afford any waste of time or money.

Well, from the first try, FrameMaker has become our main tool from text
processing to layout, and now to e-publishing. All our books are made with
FM,
our catalogues are based on MIF exports from a FileMaker database, and we
even
use FM for some book covers and ads. As our visual style is quite sober, we
have
no need for Illustrator or FreeHand, and use QuarkXpress for cover jobs
mainly
because French printers are reluctant to unusual software. FM's typography
is
less subtle, especially for hyphenation, but who notices it ?

I do not understand some people's complaints about "learning curves" and
other
paedagogical abstractions. I am discovering something new in FM every week,
but
people commited to standard layout jobs found it easier and less stressing
to
prepare books with FM than with that famous and heavy text processor. The
predictability of FM's behaviour and the strong "railing" of a
template-based
system allowed us to train and set to work people without any DTP experience
in
a few days.

Here we come to the point. To me, FrameMaker's outdated UI seems rather an
advantage. It doesn't spend memory on visual effects, doesn't cover your
screen
with boxes, and almost allows you to leave your mouse aside. Thus, we still
effectively run FM 5.5.3 on a six year old 7100/80 Mhz PowerMac. Try to do
the
same with Office 2000... And try to make a book with Office 2000...

Of course, when you shift to a Graphite G4 with a Studio Display, MacOS 9
and
other related software, FM looks like some old military truck parked in
front of
the Montreux Palace Hotel. To this I'd remark that our firm's vans are not
built
for comfort, but for efficiency.

There is something deeper. FrameMaker's inner discipline has obviously
something
to do with the mental structure of its users. People working with FM are
more
concerned with the contents of their work than, say, XPress or InDesign
users.
FM forces you to think and organise your job -- because it hates
overrides --,
while other layout software requires mostly manual, page-to-page work. For
similar outputs, you use quite different brain skills.


Once I wondered why such useful and clever software was ignored in our
business
as well as in the whole Macintosh press, and so mistreated by its owner
Adobe.
Now things are clearer. The whole small-computer world is getting devoted to
heavy tasks : gaming, fun, and multimedia futility. Images, and not words,
are
becoming the main communication items. Hardware becomes outdated as soon as
you
put it on your desktop. Software gets fatter and clumsier at every new
version,
in order to meet often imaginary new needs.

But the needs of the people really using their computer as a tool are so
smaller, they increase so slower than the needs of those who see it as a toy
or
as a home divinity, that they are definitely not an interesting commercial
target.

FrameMaker has serious and irritating lacks -- those stupid wandering
footnotes,
for example --, but rethinking it would probably cost more than what the
Framers
community seems worth to the marketing gurus.

I apologise again, not only for the language of this posting, but also for
its
length.

Slobodan Despot, <despot@bluewin.ch>
Foreign Editor
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