Customer Reviews

Adobe Framemaker 9 Win 1U

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If I were to think long enough, I might find a reason for one star. But why should I?
As a user of FrameMaker for about 30 years, I have to say that Adobe have done the technical writing community a very bad disservice with release 9.
In short: the interface has a mind of its own. Try placing a dialog box where you would like it, and it morphs into something else. (Continual muttering, cursing and swearing!)
Am I too old to learn a new product? I don't think so: new software (rather than mindless change for the sake of change) still fascinates me. But that is not the worst point. The thing is completely unstable. It has crashed out on me about 5 times today. That is not acceptable for what is supposed to be a professional product!

Adobe is apparently determined to make this into a legacy product.

It completely froze in Windows 7 64 bit, even when I demoted it to XP SP 2 compatibility. I have to run it in XP Mode to get it to work. There are also many well-known bugs that Adobe apparently has no interest in fixing. Too bad

There should be a lemon law on software. Adobe Framemaker 9 will be in the list of software where they need to give eternal free upgrades and pay the user for their lost productivity. I think the software has memory leaks issues and simply crashes without any reason!!!! Every other hour, I get a blue screen of death. It does not even save your changes when it crashes, so you need to go back to the last step and redo it. Imagine this happening 10 times a day.

I use Framemaker every day in my work as a technical writer at a medical device company. It is the only economical application I am aware of that can handle large documents and the component authoring system we use. ("Component authoring" indicates that text is reused for multiple documents.) We use conditional statements to modify reused text and variables to customize documents. What other software, except that costing thousands of dollars, can handle such tasks?

Yes, it does crash, but not often. I'd say that my crash rate is about once every 10 days. And, when it does crash, I've learned how to isolate the offending file. Since Framemaker makes backups, I can usually replace the offending file without redeveloping it.

I've tamed the interface. I keep the pods I want open along the right side of the screen in a neat even row. QED

Framemaker makes beautiful indexes. I have also created an index of part numbers for hardware items.

Of especial importance to me is Framemakers ability to link to RoboHelp. I can take my documents and link them dynamically to Robohelp and create Flash-based help. This is an outstanding capability.