A good reason NOT to speed-read technically-dense material, is that one tends to take humor seriously. For example, I'm imagining recalling retired engineers refactoring original FM code into COBOL! :)
Thanks for the image, Steve! IIRC, the original proposals for FM were made by language-oriented folks seeking ways to *process* *language* with computers, rather than engineers looking for cool stuff to program. Technical writing is a hybrid of language and an underlying system to revise and manipulate it. Those who are good at practicing it, can't help but want it to continuously improve while serving its purpose, just as they do. On Thu, Oct 14, 2021, 11:23 AM Steve Rickaby <srick...@wordmongers.com> wrote: At 16:55 -0600 12/10/21, <tamm...@spectrumwritingllc.com> wrote: >I can give details if interested, but I just wanted to chime in to the >thread from a few weeks ago, where someone stated that they feel that Adobe >hates their customers. . . I think that was me. Long time past, I took a great many textbooks directly to press using FrameMaker and PDF as a pre-press format. Problems were few and solvable, and the only time I had to have recourse to FrameMaker support was in 1997, when an author, who had written his ms in Frame, had managed to create massive equations that would not 'fold'. These jobs included more than one using structure FrameMaker. All that was in FrameMaker version 7. Judging by what I read here, things don't seem to have improved much since Adobe hived FrameMaker off to India. At 19:43 +0000 13/10/21, nuhDEEN wrote: >However, the effort and expense to maintain the FM might be better spent on developing a completely new underlying software design that seems to work the same from a user's point-of-view I tend to agree: all software eventually 'dies' as technology moves on. Look at Interleaf, for example. But with the cost and effort required to rewrite FrameMaker from scratch, including structure support, I don't see it happening. In theory, though, it can be done incrementally, using code refactoring. There is a maybe bright light on the horizon for us old folk. I read that Cobol programmers can command astronomical fees these days to keep 'essential' banking software alive. Just an idea... :-) -- Steve _______________________________________________ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com _______________________________________________ This message is from the Framers mailing list Send messages to framers@lists.frameusers.com Visit the list's homepage at http://www.frameusers.com Archives located at http://www.mail-archive.com/framers%40lists.frameusers.com/ Subscribe and unsubscribe at http://lists.frameusers.com/listinfo.cgi/framers-frameusers.com Send administrative questions to listad...@frameusers.com