Each month rotating guest writers offer a review of the monthly meeting program. This month William Abernathy offers a recap of the April meeting.

Adobe FrameMaker 7.0 and XML: Responding to New Trends in Technical Publishing
By William Abernathy

For the April meeting, the STC's Berkeley chapter hosted Karl Matthews, the Group Product Manager for FrameMaker. In a presentation on Adobe FrameMaker 7.0 and XML: Responding to New Trends in Technical Publishing Karl charted Adobe's view of the future, outlined the company's responses, and showed off some of the new features of the newest release of the Tech Writer's Best Friend.

Current Trends
As the FrameMaker Product Manager, Matthews enjoys a unique vantage point on technical communication trends, and what he's found is no surprise: the big movement in documentation is towards single-sourcing of technical writing for dissemination over an ever-widening array of channels. Further, he noted, consumer expectations of documentation are changing from a "post-purchase experience" to a more honored position as a pre-purchase decision tool (supplanting not-always-trustworthy marcomm materials in many skeptical buyers' eyes). As such, he observed, technical publication is slowly moving away from its perennial location in the corporate cost center doghouse to a more starring role.

Getting documentation to customers and other stakeholders is increasingly requiring multi-channel publication, with documentation reaching the reader via Acrobat, print, CD-ROM, and HTML primarily, but as technology advances, via an increasing varied constellation of media. Traditional presentation methods simply cannot scale to meet the demand for multi-channel, multi-format presentation.

While these trends are clear to most of us in the trenches, only 20% of respondents to a WinWriters survey indicated that they single-source exclusively and 23% said they do so regularly. Matthews concluded that single-sourcing remains "cutting edge stuff." Looking ahead, though, the trend is clearly towards more single-sourcing, more multi-channel publishing, and more XML as the tool that makes it all possible.

Adobe's Response
Thanks to this explosion of new and different media, documentation design can no longer limit itself solely to existing presentation formats, but must also be robust and flexible enough to accommodate as-yet-uninvented new media still over the horizon. In order to meet the challenge posed by these trends (not to mention that of a certain large competitor with a stated interest in XML-based publishing), Adobe has moved forward with a significant restructuring of the FrameMaker product line to give all FrameMaker customers the structured authoring tools hitherto offered only in its high-end +SGML products. With these features rolled into its single mainstream product, Adobe hopes FrameMaker 7.0 will be the next big thing in publishing, providing tech documenters with a robust, scalable, and perhaps most important, affordable structured documentation platform.

Furthering this last point, Matthews noted, Adobe has also rolled out a new licensing structure for Frame 7.0 to allow deployment in either a desktop or server environment. And, of course, since Acrobat remains the publication standard of choice for a plurality of technical communicators, Adobe's native interoperation with Acrobat output and with its other professional production tools should keep it in the catbird seat.

Gee Whiz
Next came a demo of a sample manual that showed off Frame's single-sourcing capabilities. Starting with a print-ready XML-based document, Matthews started a swift, one-step export to Acrobat (no printing to Postscript and dropping into Distiller), followed by a quick in-Acrobat reflow into a single column, suitable for vision-impaired users or small-format devices. Using WebWorks Publisher and predefined presentation rules, the same source automagically emerged as a web page, properly reformatted, including dependent graphics translated into browser-friendly file formats, and a framed nav-bar that mirrored the original document's table of contents. Matthews then output the same content to Palm and Microsoft Reader emulators, demonstrating the ability to rechannel the same source to mobile users.

Matthews then popped the hood and showed the sample XML script that made all this work. Not only does FrameMaker 7.0 now understand XML, but it also has a convenient XML scripting mode that enforces proper XML syntax. This led to a brief discussion of an ideal documentation process to accommodate structured authoring and presentation. "When you think about this," Matthews said, "you need to think a lot more about process and responsibility: who is going to do what [with the documented information], and what do they need to know." To this end, he recommended a three-tier documentation environment, with an architect determining which users will need to be served what information over which channels, a writer to produce the information, and, finally, an implementer to attend to such presentation issues as print and web page design. Presumably, it will take at least a week or two before all these roles are swept back into the technical writer's job description.

Wrapping up, Matthews recommended some additional resources for a high-level view of the product or a more in depth perspective, including white papers and case studies, as well as development kits, knowledge base, and support. He also recommended FrameMaker 7: The Complete Reference, by Sarah O'Keefe and Sheila Loring (Scriptorium Press), Osborne/McGraw-Hill.

William Abernathy is a technical writer at large. He's been at it for three years, and is currently under contract with a fabless IP core company in Mountain View. Past contracts and interests include open source software and biometrics.