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Adobe adds XML support to FrameMaker

January 10, 1998

Seybold Report on Internet Publishing
Vol 2, No 5
January, 1998

Adobe has gradually added Web and Acrobat support to FrameMaker. Now, the company is improving the SGML features of FrameMaker+SGML to support XML. This latest feature, demonstrated at SGML/XML ’97, will be available to customers as an update in the second quarter of 1998.

FrameMaker 5.5 released. This past fall Adobe greatly improved its Web features of FrameMaker. The 5.5 version of the software can output Cascading Style Sheets derived directly from the screen appearance of the pages in FrameMaker. Authors can set up and adjust the rules for breaking the document into Web pages based on the document structure.

Also new in version 5.5 is built-in support for PDF. Files can be saved directly as PDF, and PDF bookmarks can be created based on how the Frame document is divided into sections. (See Vol. 1, No 12, for our initial coverage of FrameMaker 5.5)

FrameMaker+SGML update. FrameMaker+SGML has long had good tools for dealing with documents created within its own environment, but there have been limitations in environments where non-Frame documents had to be accommodated. In version 5.5, a number of these real-world limitations were overcome. Adobe has added support for importing document fragments, which was previously a problem. There are also better tools for fixing up invalid document instances, which could not be brought into previous releases of FM+SGML.

Another important feature for environments with mixed editing platforms is the preservation of entity-reference names (pointers to external text or graphics). Previously, when SGML documents with entity references were imported into FM+SGML, the names were lost. The subsequently exported version had new names. This shortcoming has now been corrected. FM+SGML keeps a "hidden table" of names, which is populated on import and used again on export.