Adobe Discontinues FrameMaker for Linux 306
Stef Hoesli writes: "Adobe, who gave us a smoothly working beta version for Linux of their fine word processor,
will not release FrameMaker commercially on Linux.
They sent out an
e-mail to beta testers with the sad news.
"
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:4)
Um, no. :)
PostScript wasn't designed for onscreen output, it was designed for resolution-independent printing, in effect moving the equivalent of MetaFont (and more) into the printer, so application programs--in theory--shouldn't have to worry about what they're printing to, as long as it's PostScript compatible.
And in practice, PostScript has done tremendously well. HP succeeded in fending it off from the low end of the market when they brought scalable fonts into PCL, but any laser printer that's more than $600 or so is going to be using Postscript or a compatible interpreter. (If it's a higher-end printer or typesetter, it's virtually guaranteed to be real Adobe Postscript.)
PDF was basically designed as a special application Postscript; a primary point was that it stores font metrics even when it doesn't store fonts, so a PDF reader can use a "master font" to recreate the document in a reasonably correct facsimile even if the fonts aren't available on the reading end. The bitch someone had about Adobe PDFs not embedding the fonts in them now is a valid complaint in one sense, but utterly misses the point in another--embedded fonts are supposed to be optional.
Also, PDF is not PostScript. PostScript is a programming language; PDF is a document format, with no support for programming constructs but with support for hyperlinks, bookmarks, and so on. It's more accurately compared to TeX's DVI format.
And, lastly, if people don't like PDF--hey, this is the open source world. Make your own alternative. But it better do everything that PDF 1.3 does, at least everything that people actually use, or it's not going to go anywhere. Of course, the PDF spec is open and fully documented--so, hell, make your own PDF writer that doesn't have an option for not embedding fonts. If XPDF doesn't handle master fonts, add handling for 'em, or make your own comparable solution--the PDF file won't care how it's getting rendered, after all.
Placing floats (Score:3)
First of all, discourage the floating away by using a location preference:
...
\begin{figure}[htb]
\end{figure}
so that TeX is encouraged to place the figure here, at the page top, or at the bottom, before assigning it to a float.
After that, the likely explanation is that you have at least one figure which is too large to fit in the available space on the page: if so, that and all subsequent floats float away to the end.
If you're including eps figures, fiddle the \epsscale value. Or try negative \vspace before and after including your figure. Hope that helps...
Look/feel and infrastructure (Score:2)
Motif apps are looking increasingly quaint and outmoded, and it wouldn't be terribly easy to move FrameMaker to a new toolkit. Adobe is one of the few software powerhouses that still has high-profile Motif apps out there. They're at a crossroads and they need to make some decisions. Abandon the Linux port of FrameMaker? Ok, but what about the Sun, HP, and IBM versions? They're still on Motif, even at a time when those vendors are moving to GNOME/GTK.
Adobe needs to either get up to speed with the new Linux/Unix desktop, or get out of the market.
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Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
(And when I mean modify the specs, I mean that there's a process in place where changes to the specs can be freely submitted, discussed, and decided by an open group such as IEEE for inclusion or not.)
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
So, is this a defect in linux acroread, or is it just a case of getting different font metrics than you expect (which is feature, not a bug with PDF).
Anyway, as folks have pointed out in the past, all Microsoft's fonts are Free Beer over at www.microsoft.com/truetype, and truetype support has been added to more recent distros.
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Re:Utter Rubbish (Score:2)
I have produced fine quality pdf's using Lout [ptc.spbu.ru].
It ain't WYSIWYG, but then again, what is, really?
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
Re:Open source solution now (please ...) (Score:2)
Try Lout.
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
You can add true-type support to any X installation with xfstt [ibiblio.org].
"Free your mind and your ass will follow"
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
And as for appearence problems, such as fonts and grainy images, that's all a problem with whomever put the PDF together. PDF's are capable of print-resolution images, but if the company simply scans in the page in typcial 'bulk workload' mode at 150dpi, then you get little benefit. And the lack of inclusion of the right fonts is the Adobe document creator, not the PDF engine itself, though there should be a default mechanism if fonts don't exist to use a default font style.
Re:Why? Simple. They are making a BSD version (Score:5)
Back when Adobe made Solaris versions of thier programs, Desktop publishing shops, all wanting faster machines, didn't want to get Solaris boxes.
Why?
A lack of other tools they are used to. No powerGoo, etc la.
If you are feeding a 10 million dollar press a $150,000 print job, and are paying someone $60,000 a year, is the price difference between a Mac VS a Open Source Unix OS a worry? No.
If Apple is able to keep its user base on the move to BSD unix, eventually code will slide sideways to X86 based BSD, then X86 based *linux. So, just un-bind your underware.
Sense (Score:5)
* How many dtp people use Linux? These people are not, in the main, technical types into kernel recompilation. So no market for the product. Simple economics - I have graphics dudes around me, and they like Apple Macs, and, in a few cases, Windows - they don't like Unix, and couldn't use it.
* Inferior architecture - I've used Corel Photopaint on Linux, and it looks very ugly because of the lack of things like anti-aliasing (in the OS, not at a user level - the program looks ugly).
This is a *good* and brave decision - it's better to write the money off than to pour money into the Linux blackhole of giveaway software (Photopaint, etc.) - we don't want Adobe going the way of Corel.
Re:Open source solution now (please ...) (Score:2)
We're arguing at cross purposes, I believe. I'm arguing that a WYSIWYG combination text editor/typesetter is going to devolve into a system where most users are going to write an input stream that creates the "correct looking" output. A combination text editor/typsetter is a very bad way to edit structured documents.
You're arguing that a WYSIWYG typesetter is a good way to format a well-structured documents into a good looking output. I'm inclined to agree.
But, the "frames" that you describe seems very useful for document typesetting, and useless for document editing. For example, I'm editing a document right now -- a response to you. How would "frames" allow me to add a layer of structure to this response?
Re:GIMP = Photoshop 3 (Score:2)
Really, so I can do my CMYK separations in it now? great!
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CONTACT COREL! (Score:2)
So send mail to Corel indicating that you're interested in seeing Ventura (a) developed and (b) ported to Linux.
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Don't be silly (Score:2)
I started working with TeX around 13 years ago on a VMS system at a university I was attending. I did my resume in raw TeX back then. When I got my first real PC, I was surprised to find that there was a DOS port of TeX and pleased to find that it would deal with my resume with no changes to the document. When I moved to Linux, TeX was there and again would deal with my documents with no changes to them.
The output is sharp and consistent and invariably more beautiful than I was ever able to achieve on a WYSWYG word processor. Oh and I've never had to modify TeX at all to achieve my results.
LaTeX adds a whole new dimension to that. With pdflatex, I can generate PDF files. Embedding graphics and links in the PDF file is quite simple. People have said that the fonts LaTeX uses suck in PDF files but I have never thought so, and if you print the PDF file out, you get the same crisp output you'd get doing it through tex.
Translating from LaTeX to HTML, RTF or raw text is a bit of a pain. The RTF and raw text translators work marginally well but the document usually needs to be edited afterwards. The HTML translation works pretty well if you don't mind having 20 or so HTML files generated from a relatively small document.
The only possible substitute I could see for LaTeX in the near future would be XML, since the markup language is supposedly easily translated into HTML, RTF and LaTeX (And I'd still be using LaTeX for all my printing.)
Re:Open source solution now (please ...) (Score:2)
Read the epslatex.[ps,pdf] document carefully, All Will Be Explained
Then if you use \begin{figure}[!htbp] it will actually do it! (place the figure here, top of the next page, or bottom or float it to the end of the section.
If you're not sure about the packages you need, check my header:
If you're wondering about some of the other packages, psfrag is absolutly incredible! it allows you to change text in ps figures. if you have the text AAA in the figure, you can useto replace AAA in your eps file by some dynamic information generated by LaTeX... isn't that just absolutly unbelievably cool?
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Re:Open source solution now (please ...) (Score:3)
A WYSIWYG typesetting program, as long as the programmers and users understand that you place frames on a page as opposed to inserting things into a text stream, will do a world of wonders for Linux.
Re:why PDF is better for downloads (Score:2)
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
Re:This is not a tragedy, its an opportunity. (Score:3)
Re:Unix is fine (Score:2)
I'm sad, but Adobe sells Frame to IT managers (Score:3)
First off, FrameMaker is an excellent product - I've never seen anything that really compares to it. I've written a 700+ pp. textbook [amazon.com] with it, and am in the process of writing a 250+ pp. business plan with it. I've used it for years and years. It's not a word processor, though it can be used as one. Here's some of the things that are unique:
That being said, who buys FrameMaker? It is almost never the individual user - O'Reilly authors being a possible exception (they have Frame templates for their Nutshell books that authors can download). It is largely IT managers at large technology corporations - Frame is suited for manuals and such, and its licensing server is designed for large installations (e.g., it supports x many licenses, and only lets x instances run at any one time, no matter how many desktops you have). These people are generally conservative about changing things. If they've got Solaris installed, they won't change unless they have to. These people are not going to Linux yet, unless the company itself is one of the Linux vendors.
So, Adobe sees that IT managers aren't going in droves to their beta program, just these crazy penguins from /., and concludes that the time is not right.
Bleah :-(
Re:Gee I'm so glad I went for LaTex! (Score:2)
Re:Gee I'm so glad I went for LaTex! (Score:2)
Generating layouts yourself is a nightmare. I tried it for my thesis, but had to give-up. So I just took csthesis and hacked it a bit. This is a more serious complaint about LaTeX but it's supposed to get fixed in version 3.
The good thing is, there are loads of layouts, styles whatever on the net, just grab the one you like most, and \include your chapters in :-)
If you are into scientific writing, any of the major publishers, IEEE, elsevier... have a LaTeX file somewhere so you don't bother with the layout of your articles. Would be a lot nicer if it weren't so hard to do custom ones yourself... ('coz you need to know TeX as well as LaTeX)
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Re:Open source solution now (please ...) (Score:2)
The bad news is that they've broken quite a bit of the functionality, I think in the name of making it easier for newbies.
Specifically, the automatic bullets/numbering system used to be a nice way to make outline-like docs with the indent/outdent commands. Now, the indenting/outdenting automatically jumps around and is just plain broken, and Word can no longer pick the right bullet/number scheme based on the indent level anyway.
I've been using Word for 11 years now, and with a recent 40 page document, I spent more time fighting with the program than I had since version 3 on my Mac SE. It's really sad how they turned a what used to be a fairly solid program into such a bloated piece of defective shit. (I'd be fine with Word95, but you know, file formats..)
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Re:What's so great about Photoshop? (Score:3)
I would just guess that you're not using it 8 hours a day in a professional deadline environment. I don't mean that in any derogatory way -- I doubt you could tell the difference between a sable hair brush and an ox hair brush by painting with it, but paying ten times as much for the sable hair is not a waste for a professional painter, because he CAN tell the difference (and use it).
The guy in the next office from me is a database programmer and uses PSP because he can't figure out Photoshop and never does anything but RGB web graphics and powerpoint images with it. I, on the other hand, send out stuff to printers and make huge montages and do fairly involved image editing work on 300+ meg files, so I use Photoshop.
If you don't work with SWOP, if you aren't concerned with ink density or screen angles,if you aren't created complex selection masks, then you probably don't need (or even want) Photoshop.
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Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
And besides, the Arial, TNR, etc. fonts are all "freely redistributable", according to MS, and so you can take them from a Windows box and put them on your Linux box just fine.
A FrameMaker Rant. (Score:2)
FrameMaker is a desktop publishing program with a lot of features that support technical manual production. Notice that I said "desktop publishing" and not "word processing." The difference between these two jargonettes is an emphasize on layout and design, versus document composition and structure. This boils down to "production" versus "writing". I have some interest in document production, but to me it's always secondary to content. This is especially true with the current shift to electronic documents -- a web page or a help topic just doesn't have the same design constraints as a printed page.
Unfortunately, writing tool designers tend to drift towards the DP paradigm. All the commercial WPs are sold mainly for their DP features. Everybody, designer and users, seems stuck in a very old rut. There's an emphasis on big, clumsy programs that try to do everything (a hangover from the early days of electronic publishing when WPs and DPs were dedicated special-purpose systems, not apps running on general-purpose computers). There's an emphasis on specific physical layout (PDF files that are simply printed page images and HTML pages that consist of single fixed-width tables), making edocuments that are very hard to browse, especially on small displays. FrameMaker has done well because it supports this obsolete, but popular, paradigm. And it does so with a clumsy, semi-EMACS UI, which my brain is just not wired to deal with. FrameMaker does not help me with document organization, brainstorming, hyperlinking, or any of the other things I do every day.
Of course, FrameMaker+SGML, like any basic SGML editing tool, does a good job of enforcing document structure. But enforcing structure and creating structure are very different things.
I'm still waiting for a writing tool that emphasises content over production. I'm unoptimistic, having seen a lot of lost opportunities. In the 80s, there was a spate of "thought processors" that looked very promising, but never caught on commercially. (They survive as clumsy outlining tools, usually built into WPs.) SGML has mostly been destroyed by its own power and generality -- few people are cut out to design a DTD. HTML showed great promise, but was destroyed by the commercial need to produce pretty web pages, and browser designers who didn't care about the markup/presentation dichotomy. XML still shows great promise, but so far seems to be used mainly as a universal data interface.
So no FrameMaker for Linux? Good. This will leave an opening for tools that actually attempt to address my problems, such as LyX [lyx.org]. A tool I mean to spend time with, once I catch up with my current project. Which is (sigh) a massive API document, written in RTF using Word97, to be distributed via a Linux-based WinHelp clone.
__________________
LaTeX opinions. :) (Score:2)
IMHO, it's a low-level environment that can be replaced with high-level environment describing semantically what's going on. (See 'The LaTeX Companion'), or '/usr/share/texmf/source/latex/amslatex/math/test
Another mistake I tend to see is people not making commands and environments to suit the semantic structure of their document.. Here are extracts of a couple of prologs of different documents I've done.
I almost never inline a symbol directly into my documents unless it has a common semantic meaning ('+', '*'). I create a command to represent it's semantic meaning and use that (ex: '\StepsTo')
This way, I can reformat things like how I display lambda's (ex: '\Lam'. At one time, I used a subscript and superscript, now they're both subscripts), switch a symbol to another type of symbol, change the spacing around a symbol, etc.
If you want to see what it looks like in a complete document, bounce me an email.
% Math logic (for representing object variables
\newcommand{\A}{\mathbf{A}}
\newcommand{\B}{\mathbf{B}}
\newcommand{\C}{\mathbf{C}}
\newcommand{\D}{\mathbf{D}}
\newcommand{\E}{\mathbf{E}}
% ELF formulation of a programming language:
\newcommand{\Gvdash}{\Gamma\vdash}
\newcommand{\StepsTo}{\mathrel{\mapsto}}
\newcommand{\EvalsTo}{\mathrel{\Downarrow}}
\newcommand{\cdparens}[1]{\mathcd{(}{#1}\mathcd
\newcommand{\cdbra}[1]{\mathcd{[}{#1}\mathcd{]}
\newcommand{\Lam}[3]{\,\lambda_{#1,#2} \,#3\,}
\newcommand{\RLam}[3]{\,\Lambda_{#1,#2} \,#3\,}
\newcommand{\True}{\,\mathcd{True}\,}
\newcommand{\False}{\,\mathcd{False}\,}
This is all IMHO, but the few people who's latex I've seen tend to create really bad code.
Re:Competition (Score:2)
Just a note: Aladdin GhostScript is free (as in beer and partially as in speech) for commercial use. The limitation is that only Aladdin can charge money for distributing modifications to the source. Read it here [artifex.com].
After a certain amount of time, source is relicensed under GPL (and here we have GNU GhostScript), so Aladdin basically sells the fact it stays ahead in development, while also pleasing RMS (who, you'll agree with me, is not so easy to please).
Abisource developers could agree to do something similar in the future, and perhaps earn some money (provided people out there are willing to pay for creepy featurism).
About Framemaker: I use it for large technical documents (600+ pages on HP-UX) and I really like it. But for the use I make of FrameMaker, I could as well use LyX without any problem. Frames in FrameMaker are a nice plus over LyX, but you'll agree with me that you can't do serious DTP with them anyway, and they are mostly used exactly as LyX floats...
Heh! (Score:2)
Re:Future Release (Score:2)
Re:Why? Simple. They are making a BSD version (Score:2)
The problem of Adobe with a Mac OS X version would not be about the unix flavor but about the GUI. What to use ? Cocoa ? Carbon ? Don't think that a X11 version on Mac OS X would be viable.
Note that there was a NeXTstep version of Framemaker. Mmmm. Maybe they still have the technical expertise in house for ObjC/AppKit... A Cocoa version of framemaker would just rocks.
Cheers,
--fred
structured markup languages (Score:2)
I expect any significant writing I do to be in a structured markup language like XML. Most of our departmental documentats are in DocBook. They've been revised several times; they've been run through several revisions of stylesheets; they have not been revised for the sake of style.
TeX's typesetting is great, but the markup language is mostly presentational. LaTeX is okay, but I expect (SG|X)ML + (CSS|XSL|DSSL) to be a better solution. I want a TeX-like back end to CSS and/or XSL (FO).
It's sad that all this time after the introduction of TeX, Adobe InDesign can advertise paragraph-level justification as a new feature. (Although I am intrigued by the supposed use of the hz program [pvv.ntnu.no].)
Re:Display Postscript (Score:2)
Re:Competition (Score:3)
Actually, I think this argues that publishing is not heading toward commodity status; the "problem" may well be that Linux isn't making significant inroads into the publishing industry. A perceived lack of demand for a commercial DTP solution on Linux does not equate to a perceived lack of demand for commercial DTP solutions. Your perception of "bleeding edge" is likely quite different from that of a professional prepress operator, or a manager in HP's documentation division.
Say you have a 500-page manual to get out, that has to draw in chapters written by two dozen different contributors. 19 are in Word format, 4 are in WordPerfect format, and the one from the crusty weird engineer who rants about mainframes all the time is in XyWrite III+ format. Most of the chapters have graphics, generally in TIFF or EPS format. Obviously, the entire book has to be in a consistent style. And, of course, you need to have a table of contents, a list of illustrations, an index, and cross-references.
So which solution is cheaper--LaTeX, or FrameMaker? In terms of time spent doing the work, FrameMaker will win hands down. It'll convert all the document formats (even XyWrite) automatically and won't require you to pepper the document with TeXisms ("---" instead of "--", changing straight quotes to open/close, commands for formatting, etc.)--even if you come up with a script to help automate that process, it'll be much slower. Even an expert TeXnician will have trouble creating a set of style macros as quickly as style sheets could be built. And we haven't even gotten to the speed differences in index markup and image handling. These speed differences could mean weeks off the schedule--and that pays for FrameMaker every time you use it on a project like this.
And that--speed saved in work time--is really what commands premium pricing, I think. ESR's observation makes sense, but it can lead people to the wrong conclusions. Linux is a commodity solution because it's free--it's not free because it's a commodity. Distribution packagers can make money, ironically, for the same reason that FrameMaker can be sold even with free alternatives: people are paying them to cut down on the time and effort it would take to install a full Linux-based OS if you had to do everything yourself.
Open source solution now (please ...) (Score:2)
We need a good cross platform technical text editor/type setter solution now. I was excited when Adobe announced that they are porting Frame to Linux, my preferred operating system. I work for a small company, where most of the documentation is written with Microsoft Word. Everyone hates that product, and we convert everything to pdf to make sure that we can use the files in year 2005 if needed (we can at least print the documents, and "cut and paste" into the current word processor of choice). I was looking forward to switch to frame maker, but now I am on my own again ...
This is my wish list:
Re:Once again, Adobe shows us their true goal... (Score:2)
Re:Workaround trick? (LD_PRELOAD)? (Score:2)
Re:Once again, Adobe shows us their true goal... (Score:2)
Name ONE other program that can do even half as much as Photoshop for as wide a variety of media.
Re:GIMP = Photoshop 3 (Score:3)
Still, CMYK and Pantone would be nice. The latter we may never see (Licensing=$$$). I do believe the former's on the cards. Fingers crossed.
Re:Gee I'm so glad I went for LaTex! (Score:2)
Then when you have this ready, everytime you want to spell check, you press ^T in vim and there you go, instant aspell mode...
PS: It's not that I dislike emacs, (the viper mode is actually quite nice ;) but I've been using vi since my first account on a silicon graphics... wouldn't use anything else now :-)
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Re:Workaround trick? (LD_PRELOAD)? (Score:2)
This quick hack should probably work. Paste this into a file called pre.c:
--- CUT HERE ---
#define SECONDS 975421904
struct timeval {
long tv_sec;
long tv_usec;
};
int gettimeofday(struct timeval *tv, void *tz)
{
tv->tv_sec = SECONDS;
tv->tv_usec = 0;
return 0;
}
long time(long *t)
{
if(t) *t = SECONDS;
return SECONDS;
}
--- CUT HERE ---
Build it with:
gcc -c pre.c
ld -shared -o pre.so pre.o
Run it with:
LD_PRELOAD=./pre.so name_of_program_to_run
Here's an alternate version which subtracts a certain number of seconds from the real time (some programs won't work if the time never changes):
--- CUT HERE ---
#define SECONDS_TO_SUBTRACT 3600
struct timeval {
long tv_sec;
long tv_usec;
};
extern int __gettimeofday(struct timeval *tv, void *tz);
int gettimeofday(struct timeval *tv, void *tz)
{
int ret = __gettimeofday(tv, tz);
if(!ret) tv->tv_sec -=SECONDS_TO_SUBTRACT;
return ret;
}
long time(long *t)
{
struct timeval tv;
gettimeofday(&tv, 0);
if(t) *t = tv.tv_sec;
return tv.tv_sec;
}
--- CUT HERE ---
BTW, I'm Alex Holden (alex@linuxhacker.org).
Re:This is not a tragedy, its an opportunity. (Score:2)
- Multiple users could work on the same document concurrently without fear of corruption.
- The API is wide open and well defined. The existing db monitor provides an excellent tool for inspecting document structure and debugging.
Of course, we'd needPlease don't reinvent too many wheels. Desktop programmers seem to love spending time making inferior embedded databases that will never measure up to a real RDBMS for speed or clarity. I hate it when this PeeCee mentality creeps into Unix. So here's how I'd decompose it - sounds complex but it's meant to minimize the pain:
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
but unfortunately everyone's favorite overclockable motherboard manufacturer and companies like that will continue to release documentation in PDF format (even though the PDFs contain slightly skewed and grainy scanned in images of the actual printed manual). For the few times you actually have to deal with it, it's not all that bad.
My big complaint with it is that they are defeating the purpose of the web and browsers. If I WNATED to download a file to display on a local viewer, I'd have used FTP. Since I am using a browser, I WANT to view the information as HTML w/ images if necessary. Why does Adobe instis on telling these people how perfect PDF is for the web? Just to add insult to injury, half the time, the PDF turns out to be nothing but a scan of the ad slick that could have been more easily and cheaply provided as a single image file.
Postscript, OTOH, was a good idea. With ghostscript, all applications can just print in postscript and let the Postscript VM worry about the printer.
personally. (Score:2)
I find it odd that they said that you will have to either use another version of FM to use your documents from the beta or convert them to text. I would think that a viable WP running on any non-Windows platform would have to be able to handle MS Word conversions in/out. WP8 doesn't handle this all that well but well enough that I can do what I need to w/it.
Just my worthless
Sorry to tell you (Score:2)
Ummmm, no. Try again. Don't just grab random, out-of-context soundbytes and using them as the foundation of your opinion. The Mac community did that for most of the 90's and eventually people figured out it was the wrong approach.
Some organizations have been reporting equal or slightly higher marketshare for Linux that Mac OS. Marketshare is constantly in flux. Marketshare does not equal installed base, which is the number of people actually using machines. Apple has been building installed base for 16 years. Furthermore, I have yet to see a unanimous decision amongst various research companies that there is larger number of people using Linux as their primary desktop OS than Mac OS. And, personally, I don't expect this to be the case for while (though anything is possible). Sure, there are a lot of machines with Linux installed in them, but even if everybody in the world was running Linux on their webservers, that doesn't help Adobe one bit.
And outside of installed base, there are some other reasons why the Mac is a much more appropriate non-Windows platform for Adobe to invest:
Don't misunderstand my position. I use Macs for desktop work, but my servers run Linux (for now). I've been using Unix in various for six years. But claiming that more people are using Linux than Mac as a desktop OS is a bit presumptuous. Also note that numbers can vary vastly from research firm to research firm. You need to average the results of all of them to get an idea of what's really going on.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
Lee
Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:5)
My take on this is that Adobe's attitude toward Linux is becoming more callous all the time, so I recommend to anyone who will listen that they try to avoid using any Adobe product. I can't even count the number of online companies that have lost any chance to get my business because their online catalogs are amoung those PDF files that I can't view under Linux.
Repeat after me: PDF is bad.. Adobe is bad..
Adrian
Re:Linux (Score:2)
Think back over the last 12 months and look at commercial support for Linux. As far as I can remember, this is the first piece of bad news in a long time regarding software support, and it's not like there are no other word processors available.
Perhaps the reason they are not going ahead is because they don't see a particularly empty marketplace waiting for them?
OSX apps are not BSD apps (Score:2)
Hehe. Sorry. POWERGOO? As a tool people are used to?
If Apple is able to keep its user base on the move to BSD unix, eventually code will slide sideways to X86 based BSD, then X86 based *linux. So, just un-bind your underware.
Porting applications to Mac OS X has nothing to do with porting them to BSD. Mac OS X applications are generally written in/ported to Carbon (updated Classic Mac OS APIs, heavily architecture dependent) or Cocoa (Objective-C/Java apps using OpenStep foundation classes). Few Mac developers will encounter BSD while building an application. Today, the BSD component is most useful for getting stuff like MySQL, Apache and PHP up and running quickly. The only exception to this that I am aware of is Fizzilla [mozilla.org]. Fizzilla is a Mac OS X native port of Mozilla that uses Carbon for the front end drawing routines, and BSD for the threading and networking.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
FrameMaker vs. DocBook, LyX, etc... (Score:2)
Problem solved (Score:2)
This is a colossal blunder... (Score:2)
It seems like Adobe has decided to only market their Windows product base while letting their UNIX tools languish. They don't realize that it's the UNIX and Macintosh tools which offer the long term revenue stream; unless they just want to get bought out by MS. Look at how they've killed Display Postscript... I don't think even Sun can buy and integrate DPS into OpenWindows any longer. And clearly Apple couldn't get DPS for Quartz, they had to move to their own internally written DPDF model. Thank God for GnuStep and their GPS X extension; talk about a critical X infrastructure project which gets NO attention.
Hey Adobe, how does it feel to piss off your customers? You bet these guys are going to migrate the hell away from Frame once a real competitor emerges on Linux. The next rev or two of Kword is looking like it could be a real Frame killer under Linux... Adobe, get you head out of your ass and start marketing your products where the customers are!
Jeesh.
--Maynard
Think positive (Score:2)
They may well change their mind when Linux achieves world domination.
We already have several quite acceptable word processors available.
The fewer closed source word processors there are out there, the more people will feel inclined to help develop the open source word processors such as KWord, StarOffice and Abiword, which will then work on all Linux platforms and not just i386.
Re:Competition (Score:2)
True--I should have been more clear. By "commercial use" I was thinking of redistribution, and more specifically of OEMs incorporating Ghostscript into their products, which does require a license.
I've played around with LyX and find it more awkward to use than frame-based DTP systems (I confess I've used PageMaker 6.5 much more than QuarkXpress, and Xpress more than FrameMaker); defining master page layouts, for instance, is nearly as easy in any of those DTP programs as it is in a reasonably good word processor. Defining new styles is also more complex in LyX. After hacking around for a while I ended up going back vim and LaTeX directly. Of course, since these are all basically interface issues, they can be addressed eventually (although a graphic way to set up master pages will be a bit of a challenge).
Re:personally. (Score:2)
I wrote my master's thesis in Word (100+ pages)and found that everytime I added a diagram or even tried to print it on a different printer that things moved around unpredictably on the page.
It drove me nuts. Its interesting to note that StarOffice explicitly avoids using Word as a default format since (among other more obvious reasons) it introduces unpredictability into the layout.
Frame was much more predictable and its unfortunate that Adobe decided not to release their tool for Linux. I believe that's a decision they will regret and revisit as market share for Linux increases.
Pouring Money??? (Score:4)
Why?
I don't get it. They already have a Solaris/X11 based product. The Linux version looked exactly the same as the UNIX version, so you can't bitch about the UI. (Correct me it I'm wrong, but Solaris is still using X11, and doesn't have anti-aliasing either.) In the case of Photopaint, is it a matter of bad architecture, or of trying to simply shoe-horn an application from one architecture into another, without trying to understand the fundamental differences?
I don't discount the fact that there isn't a lot of money to be made off the Linux market, but I can't imagine that they are pouring vast amounts of money down a black hole in order to port FM from Unix to Linux!
--
Utter Rubbish (Score:2)
moving away from publishing
Its vital for these startups that they can edit their chosen standard for technical documentation.
This decision, IMHO, is neither "good" nor "brave". Frankly, it looks entirely political.
Re:Sense (Score:2)
How many dtp people use Linux? These people are not, in the main, technical types into kernel recompilation. So no market for the product. Simple economics - I have graphics dudes around me, and they like Apple Macs, and, in a few cases, Windows - they don't like Unix, and couldn't use it.
What DTP? Framemaker is also used for a lot of technical documentation -- something that developers often write or edit on their boxes. Considering that Linux is now replacing Solaris as "average Unix" development platform in many places, it's very reasonable to have Framemaker on it.
Try AltaVista, Google's Warez and Crackz engine (Score:2)
Give Google a try too [google.com]
Modify the search terms to include the app you're looking for but include several others to be sure you've got a crackz site.
I discuss this in Modern Technology and the Death of Copyright [goingware.com]
Yours,
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
Live Picture Makes PShop Look Likes a Kids Toy (Score:2)
Unfortunately the company was poorly managed - one major investor and for a while the CEO was former Apple President John Sculley. I discuss this in:
The Valley is a Harsh Mistress [goingware.com]
which I'd suggest is good reading for anyone thinking of starting a company, or working at a startup.
But anyway, back in 1996 or so Live Picture 2.5 could open multiple 200 megabyte images and composite them together in sophisticated ways on a 68040 Mac with 64 MB of memory or less - with photoshop you need twice as much physical ram as your open files plus a scratch disk also.
With Live Picture, the response was always snappy. Just try opening a 200 MB image in Photoshop and rotate it two degrees. Go have a coffee. In Live Picture, you see the results now and can continue working.
Yes, there is a slow "build" process to save the end result to a TIFF at the end of the day but this can be run unattended, for example overnight and in a batch process.
Further, with Photoshop there's only one chance at undo. With Live Picture, it had essentially infinite undo.
The need to compete with Live Picture is why they added layers to Photoshop.
Photoshop does the job well, admittedly, but it does it in a simple way, through brute force. Live Picture used incredibly sophisticated algorithms and very deeply complex code. It was my job to do the engineering for the Live Picture 2.6.1 release, which was entirely a debug release - I was working with 70 megabytes of C++ code that took over an hour to compile on a Mac 8500/150.
You might also want to read my resignation from Live Picture. [goingware.com]
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
Framemaker != Word (Score:3)
Yes, but FrameMaker isn't a word processor. It can do so much more than Word can even dream of. Yes, there's probably a Word export option, but exporting to Word format would mean potentially losing layout and other information. Sure, you lose formatting info when you save to text (as they recommend) anyway, but if you're going to lose info, why not save in a format that's usable *everywhere*.
Re:Once again, Adobe shows us their true goal... (Score:2)
Back when GIF first came out, no PC had more than 256 colors. So naturally, GIF files were constructed with exactly one image block within the file, even though the GIF87A standard allows for multiple image blocks. This led to a common misunderstanding among the vast majority that GIF itself was limited to 256 colors. By reading the standard you can see that no such limit exists at all because there is no limit on the number of image blocks per file.
To this day Photoshop is incapable of exporting GIFs which use more than one image block to increase the number of colors. To me that says their developers don't read the standards they write code for, but instead just base it on their pre-conceived old notions of the way it works. Ironically, Photoshop will import a true-color GIF. That seems rather inconsistent to me.
Now many of us may not want to even use GIF at all, as PNG is clearly the superior format. At this point, it may not be worth it for Adobe to add on to their GIF capabilities. But it does tell me that they don't have a technical understanding of GIF.
Re:Framemaker (Score:4)
If you want DTP, you want Pagemaker. Framemaker itself has competition on linux from the office packages, Lyx and obviously TeX/LaTeX + text editor of choice.
damn (Score:3)
For those who don't know. Framemaker is a wordprocessor/dtp package for creating large, structured documents such as manuals or in my case, scientific articles. I know somebody who has written a few articles and a thesis with the linux beta. It was that good! I think he's going to be angry when he gets back from his holliday.
The framemaker way of working has been duplicated in KWord, so there's still some hope for the linux platform. Unfortunately, KWord lacks the portability framemaker has (currently is available on Mac, windows and solaris), also it is still a very immature product (0.something last time I checked).
Interesting(?) post on TECHWR-L (Score:2)
No porting fee? (Score:3)
The UNIX ports included are Solaris, HPUX and AIX. I would be stunned if the market share for FrameMaker on AIX would be greater than the potential market share for FrameMaker on Linux. Given this I would guess that at least some of the UNIX ports are payed for by the owners of the respective operating system.
It's pretty common practice for companies to foot the bill for the development costs for pieces of software that they feel is necessary for the validity of their platform but which the software company doesn't feel it could make its development and marketing expenses back at. Since Linux doesn't have a company that really represents it (there are lots of companies that make money off of it, but no companies that represent it) the porting costs aren't payed.
The number of subscribers to the beta test program probably couldn't be extrapolated to a large enough paying user base. A large part of the blame to this probably lies on Adobe's head though, I happened across the beta program at a time when my main box was moving from a traditional UNIX platform to Linux.
The Valley is a Harsh Mistress (Score:2)
Sometimes those decisions are forced on a company against the wishes of even the senior management by the stockholder, venture capitalists, or the perceived interests of wall street.
Please read:
The Valley is a Harsh Mistress [goingware.com]
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
Re:Well, Adobe should consider open sourcing it... (Score:3)
The thing is, they could do it themselves. The beta worked quite nicely. All they have decided is that they aren't going to release it commercially for Linux at this time. They haven't ruled out releasing it when the market for Linux desktop apps is more conduicive to making money for Adobe. It's just not economically feasible now. Were they to open source it, they'd run the risk of decimating their Unix sales, and potentially eating into their Windows and Mac sales too.
Re:Sense (Score:2)
If they use Macs then sooner or later they will be using Unix. I'm using MacOS X right now, and although the Unix side of it is pretty well hidden, it's still there. It's a good example of a very usable GUI on top of a stable Unix kernel. Pity Gnome and KDE are not as far along.
Re:Competition (Score:2)
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Talking Back to Broken Promises With Free Software (Score:2)
I wrote a web page a long time ago about why I quit Mac programming and took up the BeOS instead [scruznet.com]
But after too many years of too many broken promises from Be, Inc. [be.com] I spoke up one too many times on BeDevTalk [escribe.com] and got forcibly unsubscribed after being one of Be's most loyal developers, and winning an award for shipping one of the few actual commercial BeOS applications.
I haven't had any first-hand experience with Microsoft but I have heard many horror stories that didn't make it into the Microsoft/DoJ antitrust trial. Remember that one of DoJ's problems was getting executives to testify publicly - but there's no shortage of developers willing to confide privataly about how Microsoft has screwed them.
One very public example is Stacker Software. They invented filesystem compression. Microsoft offerred to purchase Stacker, and examined their source code under nondisclosure while doing due diligence. Then they canceled the acquisition and came out with their own implementation of filesystem compression. Stacker sued and won over $100 million.
For the past year I have been working with the ZooLib [sourceforge.net] cross-platform application framework. It allows you to write a single set of C++ sources and build native executables for Mac OS, Windows, BeOS and POSIX flavors that provide XWindows (such as Linux).
I believe ZooLib represents one important part of a strategy for freeing ourselves from these broken promises.
Please read why I think ZooLib is good for the community [sourceforge.net]
Note that I include quotes from Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson, who presided over the antitrust trial, one how Microsoft felt that it was so important to put a stop to cross-platform API's that it broke the law to interfere with their widespread use.
Jackson makes the same observation in his rulings that I have noticed in the past, that API and OS vendors work very hard to get developers to code to the native API rather than using a portability layer, as doing so locks the developer into the platform.
Michael D. Crawford
GoingWare Inc
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
Plus, there are several alternatives to Acrobat Reader. xpdf, and that KDE one come to mind.
-David
Re:OSX apps are not BSD apps (Score:2)
I covered this in my post. Faceless applications (really, more servers than applications) such as Apache can use the BSD layer quite well. But the BSD part isn't going to help you get Adobe apps on Linux.
Given the progress of www.gnustep.org if one writes code with gnustep as a target, or thinks in terms of BSD-centric API calls, you *COULD* use the Mac OS codebase on other platforms.
Sure, but who's going to do this? Not Adobe.
WWDC 1998, Jobs announced the acceptance of YellowBox wasn't happening, so he renamed it to carbon/cocoa.
Carbon and Cocoa are completely different APIs. Carbon has nothing to do with Yellow Box (maybe this what you meant?).
Do you write for BSD/Unix (if you watch your system calls the code is a "simple port")
If you have a faceless server app, this is the clear choice. It makes no sense for desktop apps, however.
Continue to use carbon, and eventually have to move? (If Apple doesn't dump carbon at some point, think about Microsoft.
It's probably going to be five years bear minium before Apple even considers dumping Carbon.
By picking a UNIX porting path, you CAN get QNX/BSD/SCO/Solaris/SGI/DEC^H^H^HTru Unix/SYSV/HP-UX/Mac OS X/linux if you wish to work for it.
No you cannot. Let me put this another way: you cannot create a "real" native Mac OS X GUI application by using purely BSD calls. There is no X server included with Mac OS X, and there may never be. You can use the BSD layer to write faceless applications for Mac OS X. That's it.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Of course they gave up. (Score:2)
Re:Why? Here's why. (Score:2)
No, the point is for Adobe to keep its existing customers in the Unix market!. Consider: We are using Framemaker on Sun and other "traditional" Unix computers, and we have a number of floating licenses. We have used Framemaker for many years, it's our heavy-duty document production system. But now we're getting rid of all the slow Sun computers, and we are buying Linux computers instead! And all new employees get a Linux PC now, we don't buy Sun or other "traditional" Unix computers anymore. The point is that the Unix market is rapidly shifting over to Linux, and if we can't use Framemaker on the new computers then we're going to abandon Frame and Adobe will lose a long-time customer. We're talking a lot of licenses here! And we're not alone. A lot of other companies with Unix platforms are doing exactly the same as we do, i.e. shifting over from Sun or HP or whatever to Linux. Many of these are big Frame users.
Adobe will lose these users if there's no Linux version.
TA
My boss was going to buy it. (Score:2)
We are a unix shop on this side of the engineering/marketing wall, and the other side is of course windows. Frame on Solaris is all we use for technical documents, and because there are windows versions marketing can accualy work with us. (Though they much prefer word for some unknown reasons - I know nothing about word)
On my boss's desk is a 800mhz pc running linux that he uses as a x terminal. (Seriously, xfree86 is the only app, which displays applications running on a (slower!) solaris box elsewhere. We all knnow it is a waste, but it is cheaper then the other X terminals we have, and works better. The point is that he could run Frame on the linux machine and everything would be faster. (Frame because it is on a local mahcine, everything else because that is one less app to fight for CPU cycles)
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
No Sense (Score:3)
Ventura (Score:2)
I have to agree with you - I used Ventura and Framemaker and greatly prefer Ventura. However, Corel is in deep trouble, their attempt to make a comeback via Linux failed (perhaps, in part, because of the sadly negative reaction from so many Linux users, another story) and finally MS bailed them out. So don't expect them to go any further with Linux. Damn shame too, second edition Corel Linux is probably the finest distro for the non-technical windows user crowd in existence. Anyhow... don't expect Ventura for Linux at this point.
The good news is that TeX LeX and LaTeX are here, they are free, they work very well. Yes, they could be more user friendly. But hanging a GUI on a solid mature product is a lot easier than reinventing the wheel.
Re:Bummed. Really, really bummed. (Score:2)
Re:why PDF is better for downloads (Score:2)
The problem with HTML+images is 1) every browser displays and formats them differently 2) what image format to use? PDF practically eliminates (1) and gives you essentially all the power of Postscript vector and bitmap graphics for (2), independent of output device.
Point 1: My browser (theoretically) displays and formats in a way that is appropriate for my display and taste. A PDF displays someone else's idea of a good layout formatted appropriatly for their display (possably not mine). I do not understand people who go into convulsions over the thought that a browser might deviate so much as a nanometer from their idea of perfect layout (these are probably the same people who sent 'ransom note' type business letters when the Mac came out).
Point 2: Just choose a standard one. All image capable browsers are capable of GIF (patent problems) or JPEG (fine). PNG looks like a decent contender soon. XPM works well.
The difference? HTML + images is potentially useful if I'm using lynx or a palm VII, I can start reading before the 2 GB worth of images download, I can hit stop if I see from the beginning that the document is not at all what I thought it was. To a marketing person: I'm a lot more likely to just say 'screw it' and click away if my only options are PDF downloads, No Sale.
Re:why PDF is better for downloads (Score:2)
Naturally, most programs that produce PostScript do not produce properly written PostScript.
Agreed! Even then, it's usually easy enough to pre-pend a new definition of showpage that increments a page counter and returns. When the counter hits the desired page, call the real showpage.
Re:Gee I'm so glad I went for LaTex! (Score:2)
Mind you, LaTeX is okay if you don't mind using one of its canned document types, but if you want to create your own, especially for an audience that would rather see something that doesn't look like an academic journal article, Lout is a dream to use. Everything coded in raw TeX feels like a kludge; Lout has an elegant and flexible document model that makes it possible to write clean code.
--
Re:Unix is fine (Score:2)
Is there an alternative (Score:3)
Re:Competition (Score:5)
Ultimately FrameMaker's "competition" in the Linux market isn't another program, it's an attitude--that there's always a free alternative, and that the free alternative is always preferable. In point of fact, there are alternatives but there is nothing similar to FrameMaker in the free software world. The closest to it is LyX. I like LyX (although after playing with it I decided I liked straight LaTeX better), but there are things FrameMaker can do that will always be difficult or even impossible for LyX to do, because TeX's concept of a document doesn't include frames. (KWord's concept of a document does, but it doesn't include everything else that FrameMaker does.)
This isn't terribly surprising--FrameMaker may not quite be in a vertical market, but it's close. The front page article describing it as a "word processor" is perhaps the biggest hint as to why Adobe gave up--it's not a word processor, it's a book publishing system. There are a lot of companies using it internally for documentation and technical manuals. Many of O'Reilly's books are produced with FrameMaker. Could you do all those things with LaTeX? Sure, given enough time--but this is one of those fields where a good GUI saves you an immense amount of work. I've done layout for magazines in the past, and I can assure you that even something like LyX would be an utter nightmare compared even to Microsoft Publisher, let alone PageMaker or Xpress.
I know there are Linux fans who won't use any non-free software on principle; while I'm not one of them, I respect that. But I'm sure Adobe knew about them and obviously wasn't targeting them. If they've backed away from this it's because, I would surmise, they feel that the people who are using Linux who aren't gung-ho "free as in speech" types are "free as in beer" types. They've adopted the rhetoric of the free software movement mostly because they like the idea of having a lot of software they don't have to pay for. I can't be too critical of this--I like the idea of having a lot of software I don't have to pay for, too.
But I don't think that the perception of a "we won't pay for it if there's a free alternative that's kind of close" attitude being rampant in the Linux community is a harbinger of the impending death of shrinkwrap software. But it might be a sign of why commercial companies doing personal and "workstation" software probably aren't going to get real enthusiastic about Linux. We'll see commercial offerings from companies that expect to be selling support contracts, or that are looking at their Linux products as loss leaders; beyond that you see companies expecting to make money entirely from services (like Eazel and Helix Code, who despite being "partners" seem to be developing the same service model, which could lead to much hilarity down the road--but we digress).
There's a couple exceptions out there, like ApplixWare, and of course Night Of The Living Corel. But they're going to have to not merely be better than their free counterparts, they're going to have to virtually blow them out of the water, with reasonable pricing and enough unduplicated features that a reasonable percentage of the audience wants them. And that'll be increasingly difficult. (I'm more impressed by AbiSource's ambition than their product, but Ted--which doesn't get the recognition it deserves--absolutely rocks.)
This does beg a question. How does a company that's selling personal software, rather than the support for the software, make money in the Linux world? This isn't just an idle curiosity; some people think Linux is going to lead the world into a software renaissance, and while that's not impossible, there needs to be space for cottage software companies to actually make money and take off. So far the only ones that have done that seem to be ones that are selling Linux itself. Will AbiSource, for example, ever make money? That seems to be their goal, but nobody needs a support contract for a spreadsheet program--and by choosing to be GPL, they can't take the Ghostscript route of being "free for non-commercial use" and charge business licenses. (This would seem to me to be a workable approach, but some would argue--with justification--it's not in the spirit of open source if you have a commercial limitation like that.)
Re:Open source solution now (please ...) (Score:2)
Sure, it's a memory hog. I'd love to have some way to compartmentalize some of the features so I could trim it down for faster loading and prevent resource bloat. Other than that, Word is my word processor of choice, and a damn sight better than Wordperfect or Xywrite.
IANAMZ*, but I use Windows because it has the apps and games I use.
*I am not a Microsoft zealot.
Re:Not the Only Problem with Adobe (Score:2)
PDF is an attempt to adapt PostScript to that purpose, but it isn't a very good one.
Re:Sense (Score:2)
Re:Competition (Score:2)
Re:Competition (Score:2)
Remember ESR's analysis: commodities tend towards free solutions, while bleeding-edge stuff can command premium pricing. It's just that publishing (word processing, dtp, etc.) are heading towards commodity status.
Re:personally. (Score:2)
What this means is that there is still only one reasonable option for technical typesetting under linux -- TeX (with maybe LyX as a gui)
TeX problems? (Score:3)
Should not use TeX as an intermediate format. TeX creates nice output, but it needs a complete rewrite to get rid of static data structures, and make the error messages human readable. Everyone who has used TeX for something useful has made major modifications to TeX to make it processes his/her particular document (changed 20 constants in a config file or recompiled the package). It amazes me that Donald Knuth has kept his guru status, when the second most known piece of work he has done is TeX ... It certainly tells something about how excellent his most known work is (yes, it is excellent, this is not a flame).
Having written a 200-page technical document in LaTeX (I wish I'd known about LyX at the time!!) I'm afraid I don't share your view on TeX. Having put my document through the ringer, generating indices, tables of contents, multi cross references and three layers of sectioning, interspersed with multiple diagrams in multiple formats, I just did not have to fiddle with the base package at all. Armed with Leslie Lamports guide to LaTeX, there were no obscure error messages and any formatting decisions it made were logical, even if they weren't entirely what I intended. In the few cases where you get the infamous all-the-images-at-the-end-of-the-chapter problem, it just took a little rethinking and some coaxing in the LaTeX (not the C code) to get it where I wanted it.
And just in case I had a tweaked copy on the Solaris cluster I was using LaTeX on, I got identical results on my Linux box with the same files.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Gee I'm so glad I went for LaTex! (Score:5)
2-3 years ago, I was facing this difficult choice for writing my thesis: LyX wasn't quite there yet, staroffice (still from stardiv at the time) looked good but wasn't quite there yet either, and everybody else in the lab (99.9% of the people) were complaining about all kinds of problems in office97, or from migration to one system to another (one guy managed to go nearly all the way through from 2 to 2000, but it took him a lot longer than anybody else to get his PhD ;)...
WYSIWIG is great for short documents... something you manage to write in a few minutes and can still handle the layout of.
Anything bigger than a few pages, a few dozens of cross-references to sections, equations, figures, citations and word pukes. It doesn't do it straight away, though... but slowly at first and giving-up more and more errors as the document grows.
Then when you want to print to another printer that isn't the one you wrote your document for, the layout and page breaks go all over the place. This Isn't Normal.
I remember having had this discussion on /. at the time and several people advised me to move to LaTeX.
Sure I was shit scared to do anything the size of a thesis in TeX... need to compiling documents before you can see them, limited xdvi viewer, no spell checker... all in all LaTeX isn't very appealing for the new user.
But think about it this way: A 200page document is quite a big project. If it were a big programming project, would you rather rely on a limited point and click tool somebody who doesn't understand shit about the stuff you're really doing, or would you rather do it yourself with a powerful language like c, c++... insert your favorite language here.
There you go! and you don't expect the learning curve to be easy either, do you?
So yes, it was quite a difficult move for me, but fortunately, there are good documents on the net... just grab a copy of epslatex.pdf [ctan.org] from a CTAN mirror [ctan.org] and The not so short introduction to LaTeX 2e [ctan.org].
The most amazing thing about LaTeX is very simple: It's Open. This means that any part of your document, you can generate yourself from your programs. Need to generate a table with figures? just do it.
The same thing goes to two other programs I extensively used: grace [weizmann.ac.il] and xfig [xfig.org]. Yes they have somewhat limited interfaces, but you can generate the data from your own programs, so who cares about the interface?! they have open and well documented formats, it's the only thing that should matter.
For spell checking, I used aspell [slashdot.org], again, who cares about real-time error correcting when you can do it in one go near the end?
For the editor, I don't know what you usually use, I use vi (improved :) [vim.org] and it works great. Use whatever you want.
Okay, I probably should stop being a LaTeX zealot, just think about it. Okay, you wouldn't start writing c++ code to just rename a few files... that's why bash is here for. The same way, to quickly produce a dirty document, wysiwyg is handy... but anything bigger than a few lines of code and you'll start to feel limited if you stay in bash instead of going for c/c++... same with documents... And when the program you're using is Trully Open, then you don't depend on The Big Corps who don't give a shit about you, just your money...
---
It depends on the purpose: (Score:3)
If you're writing a hundred very similar documents, or you have a thousand people collaberating writing documentation, Some type of structured XML is the best. It'll let you have a consistent look&feel, and it'll help avoid people shooting each others foot. It also lets you design the input language around the semantic structure of what you're writing. You amortize the creation of the DTD and software over the large number of documents/pages being written.
But, If you're writing documents that have a lot of semantic complexity (mathematics books, papers, etc.) but each document is a one-off, Latex tends to be better as a half&half. It lets you create some simple semantic structure in a powerful, flexible, and easy way. In a sense, you merge the presentation language with the semantic meaning. It doesn't divorice the two issues from each other like XML, but it puts in a distinction that avoids the micromanaging hell of word processors.
It all depends on the type of document you are writing, how many people are collaberating, and number of documents of that type that will be written.
(One good sign of LaTeX being misused is the use of 'eqnarray'. I've used latex for 3 years, written >400 pages in it, and never used it once. Ditto for vspace. If you have useful semantic structure, use
This is not a tragedy, its an opportunity. (Score:5)
Okay. E-mail me [mailto] and we'll start drawing up specs. My forte is 3D visualization so I'm not the best person to do this but its got to start somewhere.
Lets take Frame Maker apart "at face value," list every presentation (aka: window, dialog box,) every button (aka: gadget, widget,) every menu item, draw up dialog descriptions (I have a diagramming technique to do this, I can email a copy of the article from the January 1990 issue of Computer Language Magazine, [it'll be on my site [rovira.org] ASAP,]) and factor out an object structure to support all of the functionality.
By the way: PDF Good, closed spec.s BAD.