FrameMaker 7.1 released

I just got a regular technical authoring newsletter that mentioned that Adobe have issued version 7.1 of FrameMaker. Having spent about two months solid, earlier this year, trying to get FrameMaker 7.0 to round-trip to and from DocBook XML, without success. I thought this sounded interesting, although having spent so much time on it, I'm convinced it will take a pretty major rewrite of FrameMaker to turn it into a truly XML-friendly authoring tool. Anyway, I went and checked out what Adobe are saying about 7.1:

Improved XML handlingâ € ”When you open an XML document in FrameMaker
7.1, the software retains the original XML format and â € œ.xmlâ €  file extension when saving. Cross-references to external XML and FrameMaker documents are retained when saving as XML. FrameMaker now provides the ability to use conditional text functionality when working with XML documents.

Sounds promising. Conditional text was one of the things I had to give up on fairly early on when I was working on the DocBook round-tripping idea. There were lots of other things too, though, like links and the things that finally broke the camel's back: LiteralLayout elements not preserving line breaks!

I persuaded my employers to upgrade from Frame 5.5 to 7.0 at the end of last year. I don't think they're going to upgrade to 7.1 without some convincing arguments. My convincing arguments for buying 7.0 was that it would allow us to store all our documentation as DocBook XML source – allowing us to use CVS and enabling non-Frame DocBook-saavy developers to write documents and output them to look like the documents produced by the technical authors – while still allowing the technical authors all the benefits of writing in FrameMaker. Didn't work out though, and it cost me hours and hours of work.

I am, however, writing my documentation in Structured FrameMaker now, which is a big improvement on what I was doing in Frame 5.5, but I'm still waiting for the payback from all the time I spent writing read-write rules and learning all about DocBook.

I suspect Frame 7.1 has a few little tweaks that make its support for general XML a little bit better. Nothing in the little bit of information Adobe provide about the changes from 7.0 to 7.1 make me think this is the solution I was originally hoping 7.0 was going to deliver. I think I'll have to wait for 8.1 before I get that. And everything I hear about Adobe's attitude to FrameMaker suggests I shouldn't hold my breath. Apparently, FrameMaker only continues to be developed at all because Boeing are big Frame users and pay Adobe big bucks every year to keep it going and add enhancements to suit their way of working.