Adobe Upgrades FrameMaker with XML Publishing, Server Version Desktop Publishing, Web Publishing, PDA and Phone Publishing ... Eric Grevstad
Mon 4/8/02 -- Formerly a rival to desktop publishing heavyweights like PageMaker and QuarkXPress, FrameMaker has for some years belonged to PageMaker's producer Adobe Systems. But Adobe has given FrameMaker its own niche: If InDesign is the company's deluxe desktop publisher and PageMaker is its offering for businesspeople who aren't graphics pros, FrameMaker is an "enterprise authoring and publishing solution" for corporate offices. And the new FrameMaker 7.0 lets companies distribute the same information in print, on the Web, and even to PDAs, smart phones, or e-books thanks to extensive support for Extensible Markup Language (XML).
The program makes it easy to create and edit XML content in full WYSIWYG mode, yet output it to print or Adobe Acrobat PDF as easily as to a complex XML content management system. Starter templates that let users work with industry-standard xDocBook and xHTML document type descriptions and map XML elements to tables, graphics, cross-references, and index markers.
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) support allows the integration of crisp, interactive images for Web publishing, while included Quadralay WebWorks Publisher Standard Edition software takes care of publishing to HTML, PalmReader, and other handheld formats. Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) and Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDav) streamline document collaboration and content sharing.
In addition to the $799 FrameMaker 7.0 (upgrade $349, or $209 for the first 90 days of release), Adobe will offer a $7,999 FrameMaker Server that lets companies extract existing content from databases, document management systems, and XML repositories for use with FrameMaker. A special development kit provides a comprehensive way to integrate FrameMaker with server-based systems ranging from Web services to mainframes.
