PDF Research Adobe FrameMaker... |
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Long before Adobe purchased the company, FrameMaker became the technical writing community's workhorse application for the creation of long documents and manuals. Now that Adobe has moved aggressively into enterprise solutions for the publishing of documents, FrameMaker has achieved new stature. Why? As with all Adobe products, FrameMaker has been enhanced to exploit Adobe's R&D of the PDF format. Unlike any other product, however, FrameMaker documents have structure - within and between individual documents. This structural integrity of the documents means that there is more conversion efficiency to be taken advantage of, especially for FrameMaker+SGML documents. One of the major fears of working with the PDF format is just that - it is just a format. There is no substantial editing program that allows the user to take any existing PDF document and author into it multiple page changes. This requires the user to retain the originals in their authoring format if they want to make multiple page changes. But then a different fear crops up. If you change your original, don't you also have to reconstruct all of your Exchange rendered enhancements (bookmarking, hyperlinks, table of contents, indexes, etc.)? You would, unless you have undertaken an authoring strategy that includes automating these enhancements. Enter FrameMaker. Within this authoring environment, specifications and changes to bookmarks, table of contents, linking, indexing, weblinks, etc. can be built into the original document. When you convert to PDF, the structure of your document and your individually tailored PDFMarks carry all of the instructions necessary to build the completely enhanced PDF document. Performance Graphics has announced their production of a CD-ROM for Xerox Corporation that demonstrates how powerful enhanced PDF files converted from FrameMaker books can be. The title of the CD-ROM is "Xerox DocuPrint NPS/IPS Interactive Customer Documentation." |
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1. Understanding FrameMaker's Features |
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Adobe's considerable website contains the basic information one needs to appreciate FrameMaker's features for both document publishing and conversion to PDF as well as other file formats. |
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2. Authoring PDFMarks |
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Most of FrameMaker file structures can be converted directly to PDF enhancements. However, there are numerous enhancements that can only be achieved by the inclusion of PDFMarks within the FrameMaker document. The technique of including PDFMarks is not currently automated within the program and requires study, use and practice. A good place to start is Thomas Merz's excellent PDFMarks Primer which is a chapter taken from his book Web Publishing with Acrobat/PDF (Springer-Verlag 1997). This book also contains a CD-ROM with Acrobat Software and PDFlib, a C library for dynamically generating PDF on the Web server. |
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3. Using FrameMaker for XML Publishing Tasks |
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FrameMaker 5.5.6 features a powerful new set of import and export filters, including Microsoft Word 8.0 (Windows, Power Macintosh, and UNIX). You can import more than 50 types of files, and save FrameMaker documents in common word-processing formats, reducing document conversion costs and allowing access to legacy documents. PDF import - With version 5.5.6, you can now place any page from an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file directly into a FrameMaker document (Power Macintosh and Windows only). You can include the PDF page by reference or copy it into the document. XML export - FrameMaker and FrameMaker+SGML will output documents in XML format for smarter, more searchable Web content. Within FrameMaker, just map paragraph and character tags to XML elements.
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