Product Review: FrameMaker 5.5.6 for Linux

By: Brian Proffitt
Monday, May 8, 2000 09:47:20 AM EST
URL: http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/previews/1812/1/

A New Category for Linux Apps: Desktop Publishing

You can call it market prospecting. You can call it political rebellion against Microsoft. Whatever you call it, more and more brand-name software companies are starting to shift some of their product lines over to the Linux platform. We, as Linux users new and old, can only benefit by this migration, which started as a trickle and is rapidly approaching a deluge.

Recent entries to this flood of new products for Linux include the WordPerfect Office 2000 suite and now the appearance of a brand-new application type for Linux: a desktop-publishing application as robust as anything you will find on Windows.

Adobe FrameMaker 5.5.6 for Linux was released for public beta earlier this spring and it is giving Linux user the newfound ability to create documents via desktop publishing. This is something that the Linux community sorely needed, especially for the smaller companies who see Linux as a more financially sound investment but still needed something to generate their internal and external documentation.

Desktop Publishing vs. Word Processing
For those of you familiar with FrameMaker, hang on a second, I'll only keep you waiting for the features of the Linux version momentarily. I want to convey a little bit about what desktop publishing (DP) is and why its debut on Linux is such a big deal.

Most of us do not work with DP, not really. There are some DP features within some of the word processors out there on the market, StarOffice being the first to come to mind. But StarOffice is not, by definition, a DP application. It's a word processor, which is really designed to help users create content in a coherent format. It has some capacity to make that content look pretty, but only a little.

In contrast, a DP application has the end result in mind only: putting together a stylish and complete document, be it a brochure or a book. There are some word processing tools thrown in to help with generating the text, but DP is more focused on formatting the content, not creating it.

Enter FrameMaker 5.5.6 for Linux, the first major foray into DP on the Linux platform.

FrameMaker has been around for a long time, both on the Windows and Macintosh platforms. There is even a version available for UNIX machines, so the creation of the Linux version was not that much of a conceptual leap for Adobe, which also has ported the ubiquitous Acrobat Reader to Linux. Based on what I have seen so far, Adobe has made that leap to Linux rather well.

Getting and Installing FrameMaker
FrameMaker, unlike the aforementioned WordPerfect 2000 and its WINE processes, has made a true migration to Linux, so it is taking full advantage of the Linux platform without a lot of pesky baggage. Obtaining this software is easy. The download site itself is a well-put together page that links to the beta .tar, and provides installation instructions and a form for entering personal information to obtain a registration license number. This was a nice change from all the segmented download sites that cycle you through page after page of forms and other hoops just to get the file.

Despite this ease of use, this download will not be for the faint of heart. The main application itself is a 22.6MB file. Add in the separate online manuals, help files, and dictionaries, and that will bring the total to 41MB. If you have a slower connection to the Internet, I suggest allotting a fair amount of time to yank this beast down. This is the only format this beta comes in, too, which is too bad, since those with dial-up connections would benefit from a nominally priced CD version.

After the download, you will need to get a registration number from Adobe by filling out that form I mentioned. Privacy freaks may not like this, but if you want the fully functional app, this is the way to do it. If you are really against providing your info, there is a demo version of FrameMaker that comes in the download. This version functions like the evaluation version, except that the Save functions are disabled. Still, if you just want to look at the application and are leery about forms, you can go this route.

Installation was a piece of cake, as was getting the license key Adobe e-mailed me installed.

I should point out something that was not too clear in the license installation documentation: when you use the fmaddlicense app to enter the registration key, use the username that matches the $HOME directory you placed the Licenses file, which is always in $HOME/fminit. So, if you put /fminit into /root, then the username you provide fmaddlicense should be root as well. Otherwise, you will be perpetually taken to the demo version of FrameMaker instead of the evaluation version you want. As you can guess, this tripped me up for a few minutes.

FrameMaker Features

Once up and running, FrameMaker ran very well. The interface starts out with a simple five-button control bar to create new files and open existing ones, for starters. There are also controls to bring up help and product info, as well as to exit. Don't be fooled by this simple look: FrameMaker is a very robust desktop publisher.

In this beta, choose from one of 18 provided templates to create a document, and then manipulate it into something more unique to your needs. I was impressed with the template selection. The tools to make changes leave a little to be desired for intuitiveness.

Here's why: FrameMaker has always tried to provide a rather unique way of blending DP and word processing functionality into one tool. This is because FrameMaker takes a content-oriented approach to document creation. In FrameMaker, content is king, and how characters and paragraphs get formatted with individual styles goes a long way towards determining how the end document will turn out.

This approach is a far cry from how FrameMaker's cousin, PageMaker, operates. PageMaker does not care what text is saying, only how text looks. FrameMaker cares about how the text looks based on its meaning.

The content-oriented approach almost makes FrameMaker an SGML tool, which strictly handles text with content tags. So, the formatting is broken down along lines of Chapter Title, Chapter Heading, Body Text, etc. If you are used to this way of thinking, then you should have no trouble figuring FrameMaker out. Those coming from PageMaker, Quark or some other attribute-oriented application will have to make adjustments in order to use FrameMaker efficiently.

Fortunately, there is an excellent set of online instructions for you to study and get working in FrameMaker better. I have been away from FrameMaker for a while and I really appreciated this document as a refresher. Its level of detail makes it a good starting point for beginners, as well.

Open a FrameMaker document, and you get a separate window with each document, with the main control window always floating on your desktop. The menus in FrameMaker are robust and provide access to a lot of features. This is where that online manual came in really handy, with so many commands to choose from.

One nice tool that made things easier was the QuickAccess Bar, which features an array of iconed commands. One half of the Bar has the usual icons: Open, Save, Cut, Paste, yada, yada. But the right half is actually four taskbars in one, controlled by the segmented icon in the center of the QuickAccess Bar. This control cycles through a set of text controls, two sets of object controls, and a set of table controls. I thought this was very handy, but I was a bit disappointed to see that the Bar would disappear behind a document window if I selected the window "underneath". If you are running a lower resolution on your monitor, the lack of screen real estate will be a hindrance to moving the QuickAccess Bar out of the way from the document you are editing to stop this from happening all the time. An "always on top" feature would work wonders here.

Another potential issue is the application's propensity to bring up dialogs that are 90 percent off the right side of the screen. This happened in my low-resolution (800X600) screen quite a bit. I do not know if this is a beta issue, but it is something that needs worked on regardless.

FrameMaker's duality means it provides both desktop publishing and word processing functionality. On the DP side is very capable object and graphic handling, master page layout, and the ability to create a pretty robust index. There is even a very feature-rich equation editor. Word processing tools include spell checking, document comparison, and a thesaurus, just to name a few.

Users of FrameMaker have indicated to me that this jack-of-all-trades approach will leave FrameMaker master of none. I don't think this duality is going to be a big problem, because document creation in general is moving towards this content-oriented approach. (It should be mentioned that FrameMaker already has a +SGML version on other platforms.)

Further Concerns
One of the biggest concerns that will face users of this product may be compatibility. Right now, the document can only open a limited number of formats and can save to just a few more. Part of this is because of beta issues, as FrameMaker for Linux does not yet have Adobe Distiller ready. Distiller will take PostScript files generated from a FrameMaker print job and convert them to PDF files very quickly. FrameMaker will also be able to produce HTML files. I hope the now-limited import functionality will be expanded to include more mainstream word processing files, since a common use of DP apps is to pull in existing word processor documents and format them with DP tools.

Another concern that may daunt users is the price. DP apps are usually not cheap and the pricing for the Windows and Mac versions of FrameMaker 6.0 definitely confirms this ($799 off the shelf, $209 for an upgrade). The UNIX version is no less expensive ($349 for a personal upgrade). Obviously, the pricing of FrameMaker on these other platforms cannot accurately reflect how Adobe is going to price the Linux version once this beta program is over. Still, if this is an indicator of things to come, the price tag for FrameMaker for Linux could be a big deciding factor.

Wrapping Up
These concerns are things that are still yet to be. For now, I strongly recommend any users who want to get some serious control over their document creation to download this beta and enter the world of desktop publishing on a Linux platform. With the online manual to get you over the interface hurdles, you will find yourself using an excellent Linux DP application.