REVIEWER’S GUIDE
Microsoft® Windows® 2000, Windows XP,
Windows Vista™, UNIX®
Adobe
®
FrameMaker
®
8
WELCOME TO ADOBE FRAMEMAKER 8
The world of technical communication is rapidly changing. Organizations must meet the
challenges of shrinking product lifecycles, increasing product variations, and disappearing
geographical boundaries. Technical communicators need tools to take advantage of established
and emerging trends and technologies, such as PDF, HTML, XML, and rich media.
FrameMaker 8 software is a key member of the Adobe tools for technical communicators and
supports organizations that need to author, structure, publish, repurpose, and customize infor-
mation for global audiences.
This document contains examples, illustrations, and mini-tutorials that show the key features
and proven functionality of FrameMaker 8.
WHO SHOULD USE FRAMEMAKER?
FrameMaker provides a rich feature set that supports a variety of users, from creators of XML-
based information to technical writers, instructional designers, and server-based publishers, as
well as anyone producing long, complex, or structured documents or books.
Technical writers
FrameMaker supports writers and publishers of a broad range of technical content, including
technical manuals, specifications, data sheets, and training materials. FrameMaker software
provides a feature set that makes it easy to master complex projects, publish to multiple chan-
nels, and obtain professional-quality results. Proven authoring features support searching and
revising multiple documents and reliably processing thousands of pages of complex content,
with robust, reliable cross-references, autonumbers, tables of contents, indices, and running
headers and footers, as well as complex tables, graphics, and equations. FrameMaker has
evolved to meet the changing requirements of technical writers, supporting both unstructured
and structured workflows, standards-compliant authoring and publishing, and dynamic con-
tent publishing in combination with Adobe Flash® and Adobe Acrobat 3D® software.
CONTENTS
Welcome to Adobe
FrameMaker 8 . . . . . . . . . . 1
Who Should Use FrameMaker? . 1
Key New Features . . . . . . . . . . 2
Comparing Document
Workflows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
Getting to Know
FrameMaker 8 . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
FrameMaker 8: A Guided
Tour . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Structured or Unstructured
FrameMaker? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Unstructured Authoring . . . . . 9
Structured Authoring . . . . . . 11
Developing a Structured
Application . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Migrating to Structure . . . . . 15
XML Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . 17
DITA Authoring and
Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
Publishing 3D and Interactive
Content . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
PDF Publishing . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Complex Documents and
Books . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Tables of Contents and
Indices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Automatic Numbering . . . . . . 26
Text and Graphics . . . . . . . . . 28
Tables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Text Edit Tracking . . . . . . . . . 31
Conditional Text . . . . . . . . . . 34
Cross-References . . . . . . . . . . 38
System Requirements . . . . .40
