Adobe FrameMaker 10 review

FrameMaker has been an important part of the technical writer’s toolkit since way back in 1986. Over the years it has developed into one of the world’s most comprehensive software applications for creating, managing and publishing unstructured, structured and XML content.

Adobe FrameMaker 10 is the latest upgraded version of this software. As well as allowing you to easily author review and manage your content, you can automatically publish to multiple channels from a single source. Effectively allowing you to configure, customise, schedule, get source, and publish content to multiple channels such as PDF, HTML, Adobe AIR, Adobe FlashHelp, Oracle Help and others.

What we like best

Those of you who are new to Adobe FrameMaker will discover that Adobe has placed a great emphasis on rich media in technical documents. This is because Adobe is convinced that the way we consume this media is fundamentally shifting towards interactive content.

Adobe Technical Communication Suite 3 includes both FrameMaker 10 and Photoshop CS5; this is because FrameMaker 10 now works seamlessly with Photoshop, allowing technical writers to edit rich media within FrameMaker, without having to exit the User Interface.

Following on from this you can also embed live and interactive 3D models in your documents for the first time. This is quite a departure from the static 2D renditions that you would expect to find on most technical documents, allowing your users to roll over to experience an immersive 360 degree, rotational, animated model.

FrameMaker 10 also supports all the popular video formats – QuickTime, Flash, AVI and others – so you can quickly and easily import video to your PDF, along with any screencasts created on Adobe Captivate 5.

Adobe says that it has made an effort to make FrameMaker 10 as intuitive as possible, and while it will still take some getting used to, for new users, there is a nice simplicity to the software’s UI. You can create your own formats or use the existing catalogue of paragraphs, characters and tables, while the text drag and drop feature, along with the background colour tool gives you quick and easy design solutions, even for the relatively inexperienced.

There’s also wide-ranging support for DITA 1.2 elements and DITA 1.1, this includes Bookmap, Indexing and Glossary specifications, allowing you to maintain complete consistency whilst sticking to specific output requirements, and retain the advantages of your existing DITA architecture.

What we like least

Considering the state of the global economy it’s unfortunate to see that the price still remains up around the £1000 mark. It would be nice to see Adobe trying to get its prices down.