FrameMaker comes full circle with version 12

When I recent­ly start­ed using Adobe’s lat­est ver­sion of FrameMak­er, I felt déjà vu.

Back in the 2000, when I used FrameMak­er 6.0, I wrote con­tent in the soft­ware pro­gram and then con­vert­ed it to Web­Help using Quadralay Cor­po­ra­tion’s Web­Works, which was inte­grat­ed into FrameMak­er at the time. I tagged my con­tent in FrameMak­er using para­graph styles and Web­Works duti­ful­ly con­vert­ed those para­graph styles into HTML code. At the time I worked for a com­pa­ny that want­ed me to cre­ate a help project that took advan­tage of sin­gle sourc­ing. Some­how, I fool­ish­ly accept­ed the task of fig­ur­ing how to cre­ate Web­Help out of FrameMaker.

The project had its share of chal­lenges. The main one was that Web­works’ Java-based ver­sion of the help was not reli­ably appear­ing on users’ screens, osten­si­bly due to issues with the Java Run­time Envi­ron­ment. After con­sid­er­able hair pulling, I dis­cov­ered that Web­Works could out­put a JavaScript ver­sion of the help. Dis­as­ter averted!

In 2005, Adobe acquired Macro­me­dia and with it Robo­Help, its help author­ing tool. A few years lat­er,  Abobe offered its Tech­ni­cal Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Suite, which pro­vid­ed tighter inte­gra­tion between FrameMak­er and Robo­Help. For the first time, you could write con­tent in FrameMak­er and then have con­tent con­vert­ed to help by Robo­Help. Sort of like the FrameMak­er and Web­Works integration.

But not exact­ly. As Robo­Help has been around since 1991, much of its user inter­face looks like a movie from the 1990s. FrameMak­er is no spring chick­en either. Togeth­er, the user is faced with two respect­ed but old and bloat­ed soft­ware pro­grams that are forced to com­mu­ni­cate for the first time. The com­mu­ni­ca­tion worked but it was­n’t ide­al. For exam­ple, when I linked the help files in Robo­Help to the orig­i­nal FrameMak­er files, the updat­ing process was slow and some­times incon­sis­tent. If I made an edit to a FrameMak­er chap­ter, Robo­Help did­n’t always detect the change. And the updat­ing process was­n’t exact­ly sprightly.

Fast for­ward to Adobe’s lat­est ver­sion of FrameMak­er. Ver­sion 12 enables tech­ni­cal writ­ers to cre­ate online help right from FrameMak­er. By not forc­ing users to deal with Robo­Help in the help cre­ation process, I found cre­at­ing Web­Help to be much faster than ear­li­er ver­sions when users need­ed to tog­gle between FrameMak­er and RoboHelp.

FrameMak­er 12 can cre­ate HTML5 help for mobile devices, Web­Help, EPUB files, Kin­dle files, and Microsoft HTML Help.

I have used Robo­Help for years and cre­at­ing online help direct­ly from FrameMak­er does require some par­a­digm shifts (for exam­ple, how table of con­tents are cre­at­ed). But over­all, FrameMak­er 12 makes it faster and sim­pler to cre­ate online help. A wel­come change.