At 6:42 AM -0500 4/27/06, Peter Gold wrote: >Hi, Bill: > >At 8:23 AM -0300 4/27/06, Bill Briggs wrote: >>At 7:14 AM -0400 4/27/06, Batsford, Steve wrote: >>>Rick, >>> >>>My sentiment exactly. >>>The popups and all of the available links SOUND cool. But in the real >>>world all my content to my end users is in PDF. >> >> There used to be a product called FrameViewer, and you could view other >> people's FrameMaker documents with it. In FV all of the popups worked. Of >> course FV died after Adobe took over the product. > >FrameViewer was FrameMaker, just crippled to prevent authoring. It was >expensive to purchase for just a product that reads and prints FrameMaker >files, and it was also expensive in the amount of storage space and machine >resources it required in those days.
I know. And as someone already mentioned, there was FrameReader, v5.1 of which is still available for download at the Adobe web site. I forget right off the top of my head what the difference was between Reader and Viewer. >Adobe's not the villain here, IMO. Acrobat's PDF is more versatile for >distributing files for reading, commenting, printing, information-collecting, >and publishing for more applications beyond FrameMaker. Nobody is disputing that. But if the company that owns both is using its head, it would roll those really nice features of FrameMaker that we've been lauding into PDF functionality. >You might say that Windows is a more likely villain, because on unix, >FrameMaker's "floating" licensing approach minimized the need to purchase one >license per user. Floating licenses could be checked out, used, and checked >in, to release them for other users. If 20 simultaneous users are likely to >need FrameMaker at any one time, a customer needs to purchase only 20 floating >licenses to serve an enterprise of thousands of potential users. It's even better than that. We bought FrameMaker for our department, and including techs and clerical staff we number 30 people. We got FrameMaker licenses for Solaris, Windows, and Mac. We were sold 10 concurrent licenses, even though only the UNIX version can use a license server. It was done on the "honour system". So the mechanism exists to "not buy a licence for every computer" if your usage habits are such that it's not warranted. We also paid in advance for the upgrade, and given that no Mac upgrade ever surfaced, I think we were treated unethically by Adobe. Even the Windows upgrade from 7 to 7.1 was not worth it. - web
