Kohsuke Kawaguchi's Blog

FrameMaker... the worst part of the spec work

I know a good person would never write something like this, but I've got to write this, if only so that I feel a little better. So here it goes.

Now that I took over JAXB 2.1 maintenance review spec work, a part of my job involves in updating a PDF document, that is the JAXB specification. There are many ways you can create a PDF document, but JAXB 2.0 chose to use Adobe FrameMaker. If it were up to me, I'd have used LaTeX, but a MR lead doesn't get any say on those things — instead I just inherited 250 pages of Adobe FrameMaker document, and I just have to live with it.

And this quickly turns out to be the worst part of the spec work, because FrameMaker is just so brain-dead. Really. Many of you are probably fortunate enough not to use FrameMaker, so I'll give you a few of the problems.

1. No undo stack. This is 21st century, yet FrameMaker still doesn't have undo stack. You can only undo once, and only if you are lucky — there are many operations where you simply can't undo.
2. No color. Formatting symbols like tabstop and newline characters are displayed in the same color as the rest of the text, making it very hard to see. All the other word processors that I know of use gray.
3. No mouse wheel support. FrameMaker simply ignores mouse wheel scrolls. I forgot when Windows added mouse wheel support, but I thought it was either Win95 or Win98. This is just lame. Really lame.
4. Windows 95 UI. The font, toolbars, dialogs are all Windows 95-ish (you can see a picture below.)'
5. No keyboard shortcuts. There's almost no keyboard shortcut for any of the commands. Say you want to select a piece of text and apply a style? You have to use mouse. Say you want to start a new bullet list? Yes, use mouse. This is just not productive at all. And of course, as you can see below, none of the dialogs have shortcut keys assigned either.
6. Font selection via menu. In all the other word processors, you choose font by using a combobox. Then it usually remembers a few fonts that you use often, and place them at the top of the list. FrameMaker is different. It uses menu to display all fonts, and it never arranges order for frequency. The particular bad result that this achieves is that if you just accidentally hover your mouse over the "font" menu (maybe you are trying to click "style" menu below "font"), the list of fonts show up as a submenu and almost completely cover your entire screen. Then you are forced to do it all over again, because the "style" menu is now behind the stupid font menu.
7. Resizable dialog that doesn't expand controls. As you can see below, yes, you can resize the dialog, but no, controls just sit there. It never expands or shrinks to fit the dialog size, so I can never see the complete title of any of our tables. Is this written in VB or what? And what's that black square thingy?

Comments

• What version of FrameMaker are you using?

  Posted by: goron on October 28, 2006 at 12:53 AM

• Maybe I'm the only one who's thought of it, but isn't it time we build a semantic wordprocessor in Java? It would produce only XML and only allow semantic markup, meaning you would say whether the selected text is a TITLE or SUBJECT or whatever. Then you could do print-previews using Flying Saucer and render out to whatever format is needed. (XHTML + CSS, PDF, etc.) It doesn't seem like it would be hard to do this.

  Posted by: joshy on October 28, 2006 at 01:55 AM

• joshy: probably because there's no market for it.

  Posted by: goron on October 28, 2006 at 02:02 AM

• This is FrameMaker 7.0

  Posted by: kohsuke on October 28, 2006 at 01:20 PM

• Joshua,

  maybe a good produced XML format for the semantic processor you are talking about is docbook.

  - Xavi

  Posted by: xmirog on October 30, 2006 at 12:07 AM

• Hi Kohsuke-

  Yea, FrameMaker's usability is dated. But back in 1994, it was better than buttered cinnamin sugar toast.

  I maintained some technical documents using FrameMaker. At the time, circa 1998-2001, no other DTP solution (Quark, PageMaker, InDesign) could handle the job. I keep pestering my friends at Adobe, asking when InDesign will finally supplant FrameMaker. I suppose it's time to ask again.

  Cheers, Jason
  

  Posted by: josgood on October 31, 2006 at 09:57 AM

• Framemaker has many shortcuts. Google found this PDF. To select the current paragraph, type esc-h-p. To then change the style, type esc-q-p and then type the first few chars of a style name (it will auto-complete). Similar for starting a new bulleted list, etc., etc.

  Posted by: davenull on November 02, 2006 at 01:38 PM

• Thanks. I guess my complaints is then why the menu don't show them, so that I can learn those short-cuts as I go.

  Posted by: kohsuke on November 02, 2006 at 03:19 PM

• Framemaker 7.2 addresses some (well, okay, a couple) of the usability complaints you have... And those that aren't could probably be addressed through some (well, okay, quite a lot) of hacking away in the FDK. With a C compiler, all things are possible...

  I'm not 100% sure but I think 7.2 addressed the mousewheel... I know multi-level undo is done, I'm virtually 100% sure you could do the text-symbol coloring thing if you wrote a buncha C code, and I'm sure you could make up an alternate font picker. (I agree that at some level you shouldn't have to hack these things in... frankly, Frame is well behind the curve in many ways beyond the ones you cite here. I hate having a bunch of floating tool palettes and windows to juggle. I've thought about writing something that would dock them all to the right edge of the currently open doc window or something, but there's always better ways to spend my time...)

  Posted by: framemaker_fdk_hacker on January 02, 2007 at 08:40 PM

• Framemaker 7.2 addresses some (well, okay, a couple) of the usability complaints you have... And those that aren't could probably be addressed through some (well, okay, quite a lot) of hacking away in the FDK. With time and a C compiler, all things are possible... I'm not 100% sure but I think 7.2 addressed the mousewheel... I know multi-level undo is done, I'm virtually 100% sure you could do the text-symbol coloring thing if you wrote a buncha C code, and I'm sure you could make up an alternate font picker. (I agree that at some level you shouldn't have to hack these things in... frankly, Frame is well behind the curve in many ways beyond the ones you cite here. I hate having a bunch of floating tool palettes and windows to juggle. I've thought about writing something that would dock them all to the right edge of the currently open doc window or something, but there's always better ways to spend my time...)

  Posted by: framemaker_fdk_hacker on January 02, 2007 at 08:43 PM

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