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By: Tim Grantham
 But if, like me, you've been longing for years for Adobe to make FrameMaker look and work like other high end professional applications, such as software development environments, film editing software, and graphic designware, then you'll be shouting hallelujahs from the desktops.
There is no question that FrameMaker 9 demands a widescreen, high resolution monitor to display all this user interface richness and still leave something left over for documents. In fact, FrameMaker 9 makes two hi-res monitors the new normal. But with such monitors now costing well under $200, most professional users can easily afford two& or even better, three monitors: documents on centre monitor, catalogues and property editors on monitor two, and office apps on monitor three.
The new user interface does take a little while to learn. But it's worth it. Instead of a completely idiosyncratic clutter of catalogues and property editors, the default arrangements provided with FrameMaker 9 organize them into logical groups: formats, catalogues, property editors, and non-visible content components.
The last group, the one Adobe calls "pods", are particularly welcome. Each pod displays for the active document a sortable table of a non-visible content type: markers, variables, cross references, insets, and conditional text. You can scroll through the list, select and edit in place any marker or variable, or double-click an entry to jump to its location in the document. This is infinitely more convenient than, for example, searching for and editing index markers, one painful marker at a time.
By default, each pod, catalogue, property editor, and document is accessed through a tab in its respective group. But you can "tear" off any one of these from its group and park it anywhere you like. Or you can set it to slide off to the side of the screen when not in use (just hover the mouse over it to slide it open again). Or you can just close it. You can re-open any pod, catalogue, or editor from the menu, as before, of course, but now you can also re-open any of several built-in arrangements with a single control on the toolbar.
In fact, you can create and save your own arrangements, or workspaces, as they are called in FrameMaker 9. You can even create different workspaces for different tasks: one for authoring, one for indexing, one for reviewing, one for publishing, and so on.
Adobe has also re-designed the icons in the toolbars and the colouring of the backgrounds to give FrameMaker an elegant, contemporary look.
Unfortunately, Adobe still hasn"t made some text fields and list selection fields re-sizeable. If you have long names for conditional text tags or long document file names, you still might not be able to see them. But Adobe has at least made some of the text fields, such as the paragraph and character format name fields longer, and has made the file name list fields wider in the update book dialog.
So, as pathetic as it might make me look, my inner geek is now proud to have someone looking over my shoulder while I'm driving this sleek new model of the former Volvo of publishing applications.
That leaves only the FrameMaker user guide in desperate need of a complete overhaul. This technical writer has seethed for years at the uselessness of that part of the product. But if Adobe can drop serious money on revitalizing the FrameMaker user interface, maybe I'll live to see them fix up the docs too.
Copyright 2009 by Tim Grantham
All authored articles and comments, opinions are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Front Runner, nor does their publication imply any endorsement.
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If you don't like change, then chances are you won't be happy with the drastic facelift Adobe has given the latest version of FrameMaker, its leading professional technical authoring and publishing application. Everything looks different "windows, catalogues, property editors, toolbars" and most are in different places. And there are these newfangled dialogs, with the creepy name "pods", that take up even more precious space on the screen.
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