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Subject:Pro's and Con's -- FrameMaker vs InDesign From:David Neeley <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com> To:techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com Date:Thu, 7 Oct 2010 10:08:33 +0300
A few years ago, the then-CEO of Adobe made a comment in an interview
(which was quickly disavowed by Adobe PR, since it was very shortly
before a release of a new Frame version) that the basic Frame code was
very old and increasingly difficult to maintain, and that they would
be moving to the underlying architecture of InDesign in the future. If
I recall correctly, he seemed to think that InDesign would take on the
features necessary to replace Frame entirely.
There has subsequently been another release of Frame, but I have no
idea if this is still the intention at Adobe--although I would be very
surprised if it were not. I doubt they are prepared to re-engineer
Frame from the ground up, given the relatively limited market
involved.
I still regret that someone hasn't funded the development of Lyx into
a prime documentation app--but then, Lyx is a free application and
would not repay such an investment. However, for documents which have
an existing stylesheet, it is by far the best authoring tool I have
used to date.
Unfortunately, some of the features are a bit arcane--but no more so
than many of those in Frame.
David
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