Monthly Wrap
Each month rotating guest writers offer a review of the monthly meeting program. This month Joe Devney, a senior member of the Berkeley Chapter, and current candidate for Chapter President, offers a recap of the April meeting.

FrameMaker 7 and XML with Karl Matthews
by Joe Devney, Senior Member, Berkeley Chapter

FrameMaker, a publishing application from Adobe Systems, Inc., is an important tool for many technical communicators. Karl Matthews from Adobe came to the Berkeley chapter's April meeting to talk about the newest version of the application, FrameMaker 7, which was introduced last year. Matthews knows the application well: he is Adobe's Product Manager for FrameMaker.

Matthews' presentation was titled FrameMaker 7.0 and XML: Responding to New Trends in Electronic Publishing. He quoted statistics to illustrate the trends. Though most FrameMaker documents are printed or converted to PDF, publishing to CD-ROM and HTML is gaining in popularity. He also pointed out that, according to Adobe's surveys, writers, rather than graphic specialists, are responsible for technical illustrations 40 percent of the time. Finally, single-sourcing—publishing the same content to several channels—is also becoming more common.

One big change in version 7 is that Adobe has done away with its two-tier pricing model. Now the standard version of FrameMaker includes XML authoring and other features that formerly were restricted to the pricier FrameMaker + SGML product, which has been discontinued. FrameMaker 7 can publish a single document in PDF, HTML, XML, and SGML formats.

The application also can reside on a server, a feature that can be used to produce customized documents. For example, a website can allow a visitor to request certain information, and FrameMaker will create a book with just the necessary sections. This is possible because FrameMaker 7 has a programmer interface, with the development kit available as a free download.

Using a laptop and a projector, Matthews demonstrated several FrameMaker features. Some of them will help technical communicators who need to comply with Section 508 of the Federal Rehabilitation Act, which requires making the document available to people with disabilities. For example, one on-screen button changes the document to a single column with no background. This is easier for people with poor vision to read, and also works better with screen readers—devices that turn words on screen into speech output.

A number of file conversions are available in FrameMaker, some of them automatic. The application will change print PDF to web format and back again. It can produce HTML directly from a FrameMaker file using WebWorks publisher, a third-party product included with FrameMaker 7. Graphics are converted automatically to JPG and GIF from other formats when content is formatted for the web.

FrameMaker files can also be formatted for handheld devices, both Palm and PocketPC. Hyperlinks, bookmarks, and graphics still work. But the quality of any graphic is limited by the device displaying it, as Matthews illustrated by showing a slide of a monochrome, bar chart with somewhat jagged lines, the same chart that had shown up smooth and colorful on a web page earlier in the demonstration.

Matthews explained FrameMaker's XML capabilities at some length. The application keeps track of the XML hierarchy and warns the user if any element is out of place. It allows for conditional formatting: a warning in one part of his document had rules before and after, but they did not appear when the warning appeared in the middle of body text. XML allows for more complex, interactive documents, and FrameMaker even has a WYSIWYG editor for XML files. The drawback is that working with XML, even with FrameMaker, can be a big undertaking, normally beyond the skills of a single technical writer. Someone must write the DTD (document type definition) and the EDD (element definition document). A FrameMaker XML project requires an information architect to determine the rules expressed by the XML and someone familiar with XML implementation to write the XSLTs (XML transformations.)

A trial version of FrameMaker 7 is available from the Adobe website. Matthews also recommended some other websites. For third party FrameMaker documentation, he likes Scriptorium. For candid discussions about the product, he suggested the Adobe Partner site.