FrameMaker 8 PC Pro review

November 15th, 2007    2 Comments

FrameMaker8-box 
Tom Arah has written a review of FrameMaker 8 in PC Pro magazine:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/reviews/137286/adobe-framemaker-8.html

For the most part it sounds like users of 7.2 (like myself) wouldn't notice much of a difference. However, the thing that intrigues me is the ability to incorporate Flash movies into documents. When I'd heard of this, months ago, I'd thought: okay but what's the point in that? However, Tom Arah's description suddenly reveals how great that might be:

... this hardly seems like rich media, since the 3D models and vector movies are represented in the FrameMaker document as static bitmaps. Everything changes, though, when you export your document to PDF. Suddenly, when viewed within Adobe Reader, the embedded Flash movie and 3D model spring into interactive life.

Now, suddenly, I can imagine how useful it might be to have a PDF that was designed purely for online viewing and was, perhaps, quite a small document but with a series of inbuilt Flash demos. Anything that's show rather than tell has huge appeal, and this could really transform how we think of PDFs.
FrameMaker8-photo 
Screenshot taken from PC Pro website.  © Copyright Dennis Publishing Limited

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Comments

  1. User Gravatar Anne Gentle said:

    November 16th, 2007 at 7:46 pm (#)

    Ah! This is exactly the use case I was wondering about when I first looked at the Adobe Technical Communication Suite. Interactive PDF with embedded Flash videos walking users through a particularly snarly or difficult-to-remember task. Thanks for pointing this out.

  2. User Gravatar Andy said:

    November 23rd, 2007 at 3:14 pm (#)

    >Now, suddenly, I can imagine how useful it might be to have a >PDF that was designed purely for online viewing and was, >perhaps, quite a small document but with a series of inbuilt >Flash demos.

    Surely this is what Creative Suite 2/3 excels at?

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