Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter
December 2006/January 2007
| Newsletter of the Society for Technical Communication, San Francisco Chapter December 2006/January 2007 |
Once upon a time the most important tool for technical communicators was FrameMaker from Frame Technology in San Jose. FrameMaker was great for making books, but for newsletters and marketing pieces, you could use the more agile PageMaker, a page-oriented tool from a company named Aldus.
Then another important tool came along: RoboHelp, from Blue Sky (later called eHelp) in San Diego. Somewhere along the line, a company in San Francisco called Macromedia brought out DreamWeaver, the HTML editor of choice. Macromedia also developed Flash technology, one of the simplest ways to add animation to websites.
Starting in the early 1980s, a company in San Jose called Adobe invented Postscript, the display language that now sits inside virtually every laser printer. They also developed the premier tools for manipulating vector and bitmapped graphics: Illustrator and Photoshop.
Postscript is great for the insides of printers, but not so good for interchange and multimedia, so in the early 1990s, Adobe developed Portable Document Format (PDF). About 87% of personal computers have installed software to read PDF files.
When many companies serve the same customers with different products, there is usually one outcome -- one or more companies grow by absorbing the others, and soon the customers have a small number of full service suppliers. The number of full service suppliers of technical communication software is one, and that one is Adobe, which owns all of the products mentioned earlier in this article. Only Microsoft has a plausible claim to being a competitor.
With this background, Michael Hu of Adobe came to our September meeting to present Adobe's products for technical communicators. As we heard in our August meeting, Adobe recently acquired Macromedia, which only a year and a half earlier had acquired eHelp, the company that developed RoboHelp. Blending product lines into a coherent suite entails compromises and tough decisions, so technical communicators came to the meeting with concerns about the future of FrameMaker and RoboHelp. Hu addressed these concerns directly.
Hu defined two categories of Adobe products:
In the first category he placed the following products:
The second category contains DreamWeaver, InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash Professional, and others. Hu acknowledged that GoLive does the same job as DreamWeaver. Given DreamWeaver's popularity, that's bad news for GoLive.
Another product in this category is Adobe 3D, a product for publishing and viewing three-dimensional images. At $1,000/seat and with no free reader, it sounds as if this one is not yet ready for prime time.
Hu acknowledged that Adobe executives did not understand FrameMaker when they first acquired it from Frame. They had visions of replacing it with products like InDesign. Now, however, they are committed to FrameMaker's future, as evidenced by the powerful new features of FrameMaker 7.2. They are working hard to integrate rich media, so FrameMaker continues to look like part of the Adobe family.
Structured FrameMaker keeps Adobe in the XML-based publishing arena. Adobe has developed application packs for DITA and S1000D. Along the same lines, Adobe is also developing localization tools for FrameMaker. XML and localization seem to go hand in hand.
Hu also asserted that RoboHelp is not dead. He referred us to the information at www.adobe.com/products/robohelp/. Hu says that Adobe plans to bring out an Adobe-branded RoboHelp 6 early in 2007. As we found out in August from Mike Hamilton of Madcap, the RoboHelp codeline was in need of massive reorganizing and bug fixing when Adobe took it over in December 2005. If Adobe can fix all the problems, it will be a great boon to RoboHelp users. Hu didn't give many hints about RoboHelp 6 features. It sounds like they will have their hands full just "Adobe-izing" it. Future versions will integrate rich media and look more like a member of the Adobe family.
Finally, Hu urged us to check out the wealth of information on the Adobe website -- especially the resources available at labs.adobe.com/technologies. There you can find papers, downloads, and even a wiki.