This is the first of a series of four reviews that will cover what is contained in the Adobe Technical Communication Suite. Unlike the Adobe Creative Suite, the Technical Communications Suite is geared for technical communicators, help authors, instructional designers, and training professionals. The suite contains four products; FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate, and Acrobat 3D. The goal of this series it to define what each product does and provide information of what the new version brings to the table.
What do you need to run Adobe FrameMaker 8? You need Windows, an Intel® Pentium® 4, Intel Centrino®, Intel Xeon®, or Intel Core™ Duo (or compatible) processor, Windows 2000 (the trial version will not run on 2000), XP SP2 or Vista, 512 MB RAM, video card capable of displaying 256 colors recommended, 600 MB hard drive space and CD-ROM Drive, Adobe Postscript, PCL or GDI printer (Postscript printer recommended).
Adobe FrameMaker 8 is a desktop publishing and word processing application that is geared for the creation of large documents. Originally created by Frame Technology, FrameMaker was acquired by Adobe in 1995. There has been off and on talk around the industry that Adobe was going to wind down development of the FrameMaker product. This came to a peak after they ceased support for the product on the Macintosh in 2004. Now with the release of FrameMaker 8 in July of 2007 and with the inclusion as a major portion of FrameMaker 8 in the November release of the Technical Communications Suite, it should put an end to those rumors.
FrameMaker 8 is a key functionary in the Technical Communications Suite that provides for creating and publishing technical documentation. It combines word processing capabilities and XML-based structured authoring with template based publishing.
With FrameMaker 8 you can create, edit, and publish content with features for automatic numbering, cross-referencing, table of content, indexing, books, and more. You can work in style tagging word processor mode, or in a fully structured environment optimized for editing and producing valid XML and SGML. You can manage content entirely in XML, use XSLT during editing, and conform to industry standards such as DITA and DocBook.
![Adobe Technical Communication Suite [OLD VERSION]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51Fly5GJ49L._SL120_.jpg)
Article comments
1 - Michael O'Donnell
Dear reader,
while there is a reason why Adobe would put this bundle on the market, ie. there is a demand for it, I can only say that this bundle isn't worth what it is promising.
I have purchased it and by the sound of it, it should have performed the funcionality that I need, but technically, my computer crashed when I captured etc.
By now, I am using different tools which are doing the job they promise!
Yours,
Michael
2 - T. Michael Testi
Michael,
Thanks for the comments.
I have purchased it and by the sound of it, it should have performed the funcionality that I need, but technically, my computer crashed when I captured etc.
While I am not really sure what this means, did you contact Adobe with the problem? Were they not able to help?
The only crash problem I have heard of with FrameMaker has been with a font cache when having a large amount of fonts on your system. Clearing the font cache clears up the problem.
You should contact Adobe.
T.
3 - RJ Jacquez
Hi Michael,
My name is RJ Jacquez, and I'm the Product Evangelist for the Technical Communication Suite at Adobe and I can tell you that we have been very successful with the Tech Comm Suite since the launch and all of our customers are very happy with it, so I would love to talk to you about the problem you mentioned, so please feel free to email me using the first letter of my first name, followed by my last name at adobe dot com.
Sincerely,
RJ Jacquez
Adobe Systems
4 - Christine
From the review, it seems to me that the Adobe Technical Communication Suite is more oriented towards the printed manual output. (Whereas the old RoboHelp was more oriented towards Help, the Word output was not very good.) How convenient is the generation of Help output with the Adobe Technical Communication Suite?
I used the old RoboHelp. It used a lot of special tags so that the source code was impossible to edit. How is this with the new RoboHelp?