We need a web-based FrameMaker

There is a small but faithful group of FrameMaker users who are more than a little ticked off that Adobe purchased FrameMaker from Frame Technology only to kill it. The Mac version of the software is no longer available. Still runs on Windows, but the software’s feature set is almost identical to what it was in 1995, when I first started using it.

Why FrameMaker is interesting … first you need to understand current support for some of the main things that go into published works:

  • writing
  • layout
  • illustration

In most publishing flows, an author writes the stuff in a word processor, and a layout guy arranges the text (and possibly illustrations, done by a third person) using a layout package. Three jobs, three software packages. For instance, Word, inDesign/QuarkXPress, and Illustrator/Photoshop/etc.

Occasionally, someone has need to do all three. In academia this happens a lot, because we often have to generate our own content and also lay it out for publication. When one person is doing all three jobs, it makes little sense to do it in three software packages, because using separate packages hinders iterating between jobs … for example, doing the layout, realizing that it won’t fit into 12 pages, and then re-writing the article and/or re-drawing the figures so that it will fit into 12 pages. Much easier to do in a single package.

FrameMaker was designed for this. It does word processing reasonably well. It does 2D line drawings fabulously well (in terms of how much you can do, simply). It does spectacular layout. It is fast, and it is stable. (doesn’t crash, doesn’t hang, doesn’t lose data or misplace illustrations, even with 100-page documents)

Most importantly, it includes numerous features designed specifically for people who are doing content creation at the same time that they are doing layout. Just a handful:

  • Cross-references — While writing up your doc, you want to be able to refer to Figure X and its contents, but you don’t know what number X will ultimately be, because things might get moved around, new figures might be inserted, others might get deleted. Cross references allow you to point to the figure abstractly, and the ‘X’ part gets calculated and filled in when you print the document. It will even tell you what chapter/section you’re in and what page number, etc.
  • Powerful styles — Just about anything can be part of a paragraph style, including starting a new list sequence, spanning multiple columns of text, pagination, etc. (can’t change column-spread in inDesign) And styles can be synced across multiple files, for instance to support chapters within a book.
  • Intuitive tables — Creating tables of text, which seems like a trivial thing to do, is surprisingly labor-intensive in most other apps I have used, compared to Frame.

I could go on. The main thing is that these features and others like them are there to support the simultaneous creation of content and the laying out of that content. Therefore the features are accomplished intuitively and with a minimum of clicking through stuff. These features seem to be retrofitted into other software packages, because they are buried in sub-menus and require significantly more effort to use (e.g. to start a new list in Pages requires you to assign a List-type paragraph style to a paragraph [single click] and then go through a modal box to edit that paragraph to restart its numbering at ‘1’ instead of following from previous paragraph [several more clicks] … unlike Frame, you can’t have two different styles — one for List1 and another for List).

So — here’s an opportunity for someone wanting to write a new web app. Frame had a user group in the 10s of thousands, each of whom was happy to pay $500-1000 for each license/version upgrade in the 1990s. Many of these people, like me, have megabytes to gigabytes of Frame documents that we cannot open in any other application. Even if there are only 1000 people left who would be willing to pay for a cross-platform, modern version of Frame, that’s still 1000 people who would pay $1000 per year to use the software.

Just a thought.