Macromedia FrameMaker - 2019 User Guide

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Getting Started With

Adobe FrameMaker (2019 release)

Table of Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

How to get Adobe FrameMaker (2019 release) .......................................................................................................... 2

Turbo-charge your content creation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Powerful 64-bit architecture ....................................................................................................................................................3

Faster file performance ................................................................................................................................................................ 3

Interactive real-time progress bar ........................................................................................................................................ 4

Enhanced image handling ........................................................................................................................................................6

High-quality images .......................................................................................................................................................................6

New image transparency support .........................................................................................................................................7

Support for colored icons ...........................................................................................................................................................8

Out-of-the-box SharePoint 2016 support ........................................................................................................................ 8

Quick access to the Welcome Screen .............................................................................................................................. 10

Slick and powerful Welcome Screen .................................................................................................................................11

New Duden dictionary support ............................................................................................................................................. 11

Interactive HTML5 dialogs for plug-ins ........................................................................................................................... 12

All-new platform ............................................................................................................................................................................ 13

New Windows-based File Open dialog .......................................................................................................................... 13

One-click image resizing ........................................................................................................................................................... 13

WebP and Icon image support ............................................................................................................................................. 15

Faster and lighter setup .............................................................................................................................................................16

From PDF to Responsive HTML5. Accelerate your publishing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Modern PDF engine ......................................................................................................................................................................17

WYSIWYG color output ..............................................................................................................................................................19

Password protected PDFs ........................................................................................................................................................19

All-new PDF engine ..................................................................................................................................................................... 21

Customize DITA templates for PDF output ..................................................................................................................22

Greater content accessibility ................................................................................................................................................. 23

Getting started with XML/DITA has never been easier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25

Faster XML file handling ...........................................................................................................................................................25

Effortless EDD creation .............................................................................................................................................................26

Smoother DITA authoring experience ...........................................................................................................................26

DITA-OT 3.0 support ................................................................................................................................................................... 28

XSLT 3.0 support ............................................................................................................................................................................ 28

Enhanced Packager ..................................................................................................................................................................... 28

Additional resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31

Version comparison chart ........................................................................................................................................................ 31

Product page ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 31

User guides and Support pages ........................................................................................................................................... 31

Legal notices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33

Introduction

Adobe FrameMaker (2019 release) is fast, powerful, and future-ready authoring and publishing solution. With an all-new 64-bit architecture, you can significantly boost productivity with more memory for long, complex documents. The new image processing engine provides support for new image formats and maintains image transparency. The all-new PDF engine improves the publishing speed anywhere between 35% to 65%. You now have more control over PDF settings, which includes setting marks, bleeds, creating password-protected PDFs and more. If this not enough, boost productivity with multiple enhancements in XML workspace, structure view, breadcrumbs and more.

This guide presents you an overview of the new features and workflows in FrameMaker (2019 release). A large number of narrated videos make it easy for you to become familiar with the changes in the UI and help you get started with this release.

Besides this Getting Started Guide, you will find the FrameMaker User Guide and many other resources at adobe.com. A collection of key FrameMaker resources is presented in the Addi-

tional resources section of this guide.

Introduction

How to get Adobe FrameMaker (2019 release)

To try FrameMaker before buying, download a fully functional, 30-day complimentary trial version. Learn about the various ways to buy Adobe FrameMaker (2019 release) here. If you want to purchase a new FrameMaker license or already have a license of an earlier version of FrameMaker, see the following table for special pricing.

Note: The table displays base prices. Actual price can vary depending on the country and currency of purchase, product language, and applicable local taxes.

*Base pricing in international regions

± Upgrade to FrameMaker (2019 release) from Adobe FrameMaker XML Author is included as part of upgrade from FrameMaker (2015 release) or older. For Enterprise customers it would be taken on case to case basis.

‡ Cancellation fee for annual subscription plan is 50% of the remaining contract obligation, if

canceled after 14 days. For more information, visit the FrameMaker website.

Pricing for

FrameMaker (2019 release)

USD EUR AUD YEN

New user $999 €1,324 $1,324 ¥131,500

Upgrade from

FrameMaker (2017 release)

$399 €529 $529 ¥52,500

FrameMaker (2015 release)±

$599 €794 $794 ¥78,900

Older version of Technical Communication Suite to (2019 release)

$1,199 €1,199 $1,199 ¥158,000

One year subscription plan‡

$29.99/month per user

€39.99/month per user

$39.99/month per user

¥3,900/mo nth per user

Turbo-charge your content creation

Powerful 64-bit architecture

FrameMaker (2019 release) now comes with 64-bit system support. You can install FrameMaker on a 64-bit system and leverage better memory management, faster file operations, and faster publishing capabilities.

With the limitation of memory allocation and usage in a 32-bit system, working with large documents was a big challenge. This challenge will no longer be an obstruction. Install FrameMaker on a 64-bit system and enjoy the faster than ever performance with you favorite authoring and publishing software.

If you still love the old 32-bit FrameMaker, you can download it from Adobe.com.

Faster file performance

Experience faster performance while working with files or publishing your content. The core architecture of FrameMaker has been enhanced to give you much faster file operations. For example, your large DITA documents containing a lot of cross-references take 30%-40% lesser time to open. For unstructured documents with a large number cross-references, this improvement is anywhere between 10%-20%. Also, saving a bunch of files is much faster.

Turbo-charge your content creation

Interactive real-time progress bar

Publishing a large set of documents in FrameMaker could take from a minute to much longer. Now you won’t have to wait longer to publish a large set documents or a book. You will experience almost 39% of improvement in the publishing time for generating PDF output.

Interactive real-time progress bar

The progress bar in FrameMaker contained only a blue bar that moved from start to finish without giving any details. The progress bar is no longer a simple blue-colored, start to finish bar. Now, you have the real-time information available on the progress bar.

The informative progress bar shows the status of the task that is being performed currently in FrameMaker. For example, when you update a book, the progress bar displays status like opening a file, processing a file, generating index file, and so on. Similarly, when you are running a publishing task, the progress bar shows you what processing is being performed on the files, such as file opening, conversion process, application of some transformations, and so on.

Turbo-charge your content creation

Interactive real-time progress bar

The following screenshots are captured at different stages of saving, updating, and publishing tasks.

Turbo-charge your content creation

Enhanced image handling

Working on documents containing hundreds and thousands of images had its own challenges. You wo ul d have faced i ssue s l ik e:

• Lag while scrolling pages.

• Lag while inserting multiple images at the same time.

With the major enhancements in the image handling process in FrameMaker, you will no longer face any such lags. You can now scroll through a document containing hundreds of images much smoother and faster. Also, you will now be able to import multiple images at the same time without any issue.

High-quality images

Working with high-quality image format like SVG was a big challenge in FrameMaker. The image quality while authoring was different from the final published output. There were issues of color loss and pixelation. At times, even scrolling through pages containing heavy JPEG images was slow.

FrameMaker (2019 release) eliminates all issues you faced while working with high-quality images. The images are imported smoothly and are also published in high quality. This improvement has been made possible by shifting from the traditional image processing tech-

Turbo-charge your content creation

New image transparency support

nology to the latest technologies from Adobe’s leading image processing applications. With enhancements in the image processing capabilities, you get the best possible quality of SVG and JPEG images while authoring and in the final published output.

New image transparency support

Having images with transparent background is a very common scenario. However, when you published any such image from FrameMaker, the image’s background transparency was lost. FrameMaker’s older image processing engine would replace the transparency with white color. This issue was more prominent in places where the background color of the image placeholder (like the colored table cell or colored body page) was not white.

With the current release of FrameMaker, all your transparent images will publish as is. FrameMaker will retain an image’s transparency at the time of authoring as well as when you publish it. This will give a much better look-and-feel to your published output — be it a PDF or responsive HTML5 output.

Support for colored icons

Due to high customer demand, FrameMaker (2019 release) reintroduces colored icons. The colored icons have been added in the main toolbar and various pods. Using the colored icons improves the accessibility of FrameMaker's user interface and gives a much brighter and color-

Turbo-charge your content creation

Out-of-the-box SharePoint 2016 support

ful UI experience. You can still switch between colored and grayscale icons from the Preferences dialog.

Out-of-the-box SharePoint 2016 support

Whether you are using on-premises SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint Online, FrameMaker gives you easy access to both the systems. You can easily access your documents on a SharePoint

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Out-of-the-box SharePoint 2016 support

server by configuring the connection settings in the Connection Manager dialog. The Connection Manager dialog now has a new option to let you connect to the SharePoint Online server.

Turbo-charge your content creation

Quick access to the Welcome Screen

The Welcome Screen provides quick access to your recently opened documents, document templates, repository connections, and much more. The Welcome Screen is shown when you launch FrameMaker. Once you open a document, the Welcome Screen would go behind the opened document. To get back to the Welcome Screen, you would have to close all opened documents. This was not an ideal way of accessing the Welcome Screen.

Starting from FrameMaker (2019 release) you will not have to close any open document to access the Welcome Screen. You can easily switch to the Welcome Screen from the Workspace menu. Simply select the Show Welcome Screen option from the Workspace menu, and you are shown the Welcome Screen.

Turbo-charge your content creation

Slick and powerful Welcome Screen

The Welcome Screen is a very versatile and powerful tool to let you quickly access a wide range of resources. Just click a button and add your documents or even templates in the favorite list for quick and easy access. Customization options are also available for advanced users to add their own templates, plug-in, or even instructions to work on a project or a file. Make use of this new and enhanced powerful tool to improve your productivity.

New Duden dictionary support

Duden is considered to be a well-respected dictionary in Germany. Until now, FrameMaker only supported Hunspell dictionary for spelling and hyphenation of German words. Starting from FrameMaker (2019 release), German users will get the latest Duden dictionary for spell-checking and hyphenation.

The updated Duden dictionary is now available for a host of German language variants. From the earlier support of only 4 German language variants, you will not get 7 German language variants. The new German dictionary also includes support for Austrian German. For the older variants, you can still continue to use Hunspell dictionary.

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Interactive HTML5 dialogs for plug-ins

FrameMaker developers can now create more interactive and rich dialogs in their client applications or plug-ins. In addition to the existing DRE files, FrameMaker now give your an option to create the dialog boxes in HTML5 format.

You can u se HTML5, CSS3, a nd Java Sc ript to crea te dialogs to interact with FrameMaker and your users. Working with HTML5 is much more simpler as compared to DRE files, this will result in significant reduction of effort required to create your client applications.

The new Customizing DITA feature in FrameMaker uses HTML5 dialogs.

Turbo-charge your content creation

All-new platform

There has been a lot of clean-up and enhancements in the FrameMaker’s core libraries. The old library files are now removed to reduce the clutter. And, the old libraries have been upgraded with the latest Adobe or open-source libraries.

With this change, you will find a great deal of performance enhancement while working with large structured or unstructured files. Performance improvement from 20%-40% has been noticed in opening up large documents. Even publishing a large set of files is now improved and you get the published output in much lesser time than before.

New Windows-based File Open dialog

The existing File browsing dialogs are enhanced to provide more seamless working experience. The File browsing dialogs are now based on Windows native dialog box technology which is powerful and provides a variety of customization options. If you still love the older dialog, easily switch back by saving your choice in the Preferences dialog.

One-click image resizing

Working with images is easier than ever before. Whenever you resize any image, the anchored frame size had to be manually readjusted. Similarly, when you resized an anchored frame, the image had to be manually resized. Whether you wanted to resize an image or an anchored frame, it was a multi-step process.

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One-click image resizing

FrameMaker now gives you an option to resize your image or the anchored frame with a few clicks. The context menu on an image and anchored frame provide options for you to work with image and anchored frame with ease. For example, if your anchored frame is larger than the image, simply right click on the image and select Fit To Frame, and the image resizes to fit into the anchored frame. Similarly, if your anchored frame is larger than your image, right click on the anchored frame and select Fit To Image, and the anchored frame resizes to fit your image. In addition to these useful features, the context menu provides you the options of selecting image or anchored frame with ease.

Turbo-charge your content creation

WebP and Icon image support

FrameMaker allows you to insert a wide variety of images in your documents. With this release of FrameMaker, you will now be able to import WebP and Icon images into your documents.

WebP image format is developed by Google and it supports both lossy and lossless compression. Due to its smaller file size and better image quality, WebP image format is considered as one of the best alternative to PNG and JPEG file formats.

Similarly, the icon (*.ico) file format is a popular image format for icons on Windows. Now when you insert an image, you will find new options of WEBP (*.webp) and ICO (*.ico) formats in the supported image formats drop-down list.

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Faster and lighter setup

Downloading and installing FrameMaker has been a time consuming process. Even the uninstallation process would take anywhere between 10-15 minutes. But not any more!

The new FrameMaker installer is much lighter and faster. The installer now requires much lesser space and is based on Adobe’s latest installer technology. The new installer is much more user friendly, visually rich, and comes integrated with Hyperdrive. The Hyperdrive integration gives users an option to share their usage experience with Adobe to improve their product usage experience.

From PDF to Responsive HTML5. Accelerate your publishing.

Modern PDF engine

The new PDF generation framework not only gives you the best looking PDF, but also gives you more control on how you want to publish it. The new PDF engine creates PDFs natively, which means that PDF generation process does not go through printing to PostScript and Acrobat Distiller. The new PDF engine is based on Adobe’s PDF Library, which is used by other Adobe products like Adobe InDesign.

The Publish pod now has PDF as one of the publishing formats. When you open the publish settings for PDF, you will find five main categories of configuring the PDF output.

The five categories of PDF publish settings are — General, Marks and Bleeds, Security, DITA Template, and DITA Options. The General settings allow you to configure the output preset, PDF standard, compatibility, viewing options, and more. The Marks and Bleed setting can be used to set the crop, bleed, registration marks, and bleed and slug settings. You can add more security to your PDF output by setting password to open the PDF file. The DITA Templates settings are used to configure the templates that you want to use to publish the document. Finally, if you want to save the PDF via Book route, then you can choose what to include or exclude from the published PDF in the DITA Options settings.

From PDF to Responsive HTML5. Accelerate your publishing.

Modern PDF engine

Once you have configured the publish settings for PDF output, the same settings can be used to generate multiple PDFs. Also, the settings are stored in a .sts file, which can be shared with other users to ensure you maintain a consistent looking PDFs across your organization.

From PDF to Responsive HTML5. Accelerate your publishing.

WYSIWYG color output

There were pros and cons in using RBG and CYMK color settings. Some of the main issues faced by users while generating PDF output included:

• Not being able to use CYMK colors for publishing a right-to-left document.

• Double-byte characters corruption issue.

• Rotated images getting cropped when published using CYMK color settings.

• Missing spot colors.

• Missing color profiles for images in the PDF.

You no w ge t the precise and con si st en t colors in your PDF output. While generating PDF output, you no longer have to select the RGB or CYMK color settings. This has been made possible because of the new PDF engine, which gives you PDF output as you see it while authoring.

Password protected PDFs

PDF is the preferred document delivery format when it comes to sharing sensitive information. However, generating a secured PDF output was a multi-step process in FrameMaker.

From PDF to Responsive HTML5. Accelerate your publishing.

Password protected PDFs

FrameMaker (2019 release) comes with the feature of creating password-protected PDFs. Simply open the PDF publish setting, go to the Security tab, and set a password. Once you have configured the password settings, every PDF that you generate using this setting would add password security in the published PDF file. Your users would not be able to open the PDF until they enter the correct password. The password is encrypted using the 128-bit encryption level, which makes it almost impossible for any hacker to break open the PDF.

From PDF to Responsive HTML5. Accelerate your publishing.

All-new PDF engine

FrameMaker (2019 release) uses the latest PDF generation framework from Adobe. This improves the quality of PDF output that you get from FrameMaker. The new framework provides a range of added capabilities, which include:

•Faster PDF generation

•Mixed page size

• Better rendering of vector images

• No more image pixelation issue

• Color profiles for images in the PDF

• Color bar with mark and bleed information

•And, more...

From PDF to Responsive HTML5. Accelerate your publishing.

Customize DITA templates for PDF output

Customizing the default PDF output has not been an easy task. Even the advanced users of FrameMaker would find it challenging to generate PDF output as per their requirements. This is primarily because the PDF engine uses configurations from multiple files to generate the PDF output.

Customizing PDF output is now simple and faster. You can customize PDF output from a single place. The new PDF settings in the Publish Dialog gives you access to all templates from a single DITA Templates tab. Simply export the desired template, make changes to it, and import it back to your PDF settings. FrameMaker stores all customizations in the settings file (.sts), which can be easily exported and used on any other system.

From PDF to Responsive HTML5. Accelerate your publishing.

Greater content accessibility

The responsive HTML5 layouts shipped out of the box are responsive and Section 508 compliant. Now, you can also generate accessible PDFs from FrameMaker. The new publish settings give you more control over generating tagged PDFs. The auto-tag creation feature lets you easily create tagged PDFs by simply selecting an option in the publish settings. If you know what you want, then customize the tags as per your needs. The new Tags tab in the PDF Setup dialog lets to maps the required tags with the paragraph styles used in your document.

From PDF to Responsive HTML5. Accelerate your publishing.

Greater content accessibility

Getting started with XML/DITA has never been easier

Faster XML file handling

FrameMaker (2019 release) uses a new Java-based XML parsing engine that significantly reduces the amount of time required to parse XML files. With the new parsing engine, opening, editing, saving or packaging your XML files is much faster.

Getting started with XML/DITA has never been easier

Effortless EDD creation

Creating EDD has always been considered as time-consuming and complex process. FrameMaker now gives you an easy-to-use interface to create EDD quickly and easily. This new EDD creation feature supports Lightweight DITA and DITA 1.3 document types.

The new Customize DITA plugin uses the RELAXNG schema. Currently, DITA 1.3 and Lightweight DITA specifications have been used in this plugin. You can customize the existing DITA shells by including or excluding modules, domains or elements within a shell. The plug-in also allows you to easily apply a CSS to give a new look and feel to the DITA topic. Once you have your customizations in place, a new document can be created by simply choosing File > New > DITA menu.

Smoother DITA authoring experience

Every new release of FrameMaker brings in new and enhanced features in the Structured authoring space. With this new release you will get:

• An enhanced look to the Structure View.

• See the breadcrumbs in the WYSIWYG view and use them to navigate through the path of the current element.

Getting started with XML/DITA has never been easier

Smoother DITA authoring experience

•Context menu with new options to insert or paste elements before or after the current element.

Getting started with XML/DITA has never been easier

DITA-OT 3.0 support

Support for DITA Open Toolkit (DITA-OT) is now upgraded to version 3.0. DITA-OT 3.0 comes with support for markdown, normalized DITA output, and other enhancements to support Lightweight DITA. For more information about DITA-OT, visit http://www.dita-ot.org.

XSLT 3.0 support

FrameMaker now supports XSLT 3.0 via SAXON Enterprise Edition 9.8.3 processor. You can create a variety of transformation scenarios by applying predefined or customized XSLT on XML files, and execute them using a range of JAXP-compliant processors. You can define the scope of transformation tasks to execute on a file, all files in a folder, DITA map or all children of a book.

Enhanced Packager

The package manager has been enhanced to create packages quickly with the support of new parsing engine. You can easily create self-contained package of your documents, books or DITA maps — with all referenced files, images, and configurations included.