"In-Design" Acrobat "Quark Express" PageMaker FrameMaker FrameMaker (Now Adobe) A long-document writing and publishing application geared toward technical, scientific, and educational publishing. Long the tool of choice for technical and science writers, though pure XML-based workflows are supplanting it. Frame (as it is known), is geared towards separation of style and content -- you set up the (hopefully semantically meaningful) styles and one or more page types, and then write within that template. (As opposed to PageMaker, Quark, InDesign?, etc., which are generally used for design-y documents such as marketing literature where every page often has an individual look.) (Also unlike Word, which provides no way to enforce a stylesheet, and in facts makes it very, very easy to accidentally override a style.) Originally developed by Frame Inc (first release was 1986, IIRC), later bought by Adobe. As of 2004, Frame has not had any major upgrades or new features for many years. PageMaker (Adobe) In-Design Quark Express ============================================================================================= RAW NOTES: The Official TECHWR-L Web Site Magazine | Store Employment Archive | Calendar TECHWR-L Info TECHWR-L Dinner at STC Sponsors Platinum WebWorks Gold Information Mapping ComponentOne WritersUA Silver Malaspina University-College Bronze Hyperionics: Home of Screen Capture Bestsellers HyperSnap-DX and HyperCam 5 Clicks screen capture (print screen) program WTB Language Group Inc.: language translation service specializing in technical and web site translations. Help and Manual, TNT screen capture TECHWR-L Home > TECHWR-L List Archives > Printer-friendly version [Author Prev][Author Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Author Index (this month)][Thread Index (this month)][Top of Archive] Re: Rumor about FrameMaker - is it true? Subject: Re: Rumor about FrameMaker - is it true? From: "Phillip St. James" To: "TECHWR-L" Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 23:50:24 -0800 Perhaps I'm imagining things here, but are you saying that InDesign already has more customers and users than Frame has? And I'm "talking out of my hat" to disagree beforehand with Mr. Neeley's unsubstantiated assertion? InDesign's market share has never been shown to be greater than QuarkXPress's by Adobe or any other reputable independent market analyst. "...XPress, on the other hand, is as much a standard in publishing as Microsoft Word or Excel in office computing. It has an extremely loyal user base, and, more importantly, it has proven over and over again that it is a reliable and efficient production tool, a claim on which InDesign still has to prove its abilities..." (http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-823935.html) Seriously, most anyone would be able to intuit, interpolate or extrapolate that InDesign, a relatively new text and graphics editing title (i.e., 48 months old and 5 months old in its present version) that is CLEARLY positioned in the marketplace to compete against QuarkXPress and to replace Adobe's own Aldus PageMaker, could NOT be overtaking FrameMaker in cumulative or standalone or quarterly sales volume. Adobe FrameMaker is the undisputed mainstay star spanning almost 20 years in the text editing, book and manual publishing industry. Mr. Neeley's criticism makes very little sense to me and I challenge him to prove that his contention is true. That is, Mr. Neeley, please PROVE by any means acceptable in common human reality that InDesign has more actual users or that InDesign sells more copies (on its own as a standalone title or even combined in its CS bundling) than FrameMaker, or that FrameMaker's entire installed customer base is smaller than InDesign's standalone or CS-bundle installed customer base. I'm blind copying some Adobe employees with this post so we can try to get to the truth here. That said, Adobe never officially tells anyone much about the sales performance of its product lines unless it must for investor relations or other legal purposes. Meaning, Adobe does not publish breakdowns for each of its software titles on its 10-K SEC forms. So, we may never know with absolute certainty whether InDesign is selling anywhere near the established customer base that FrameMaker enjoys on its Unix (including Linux), PC and Mac OS X and 9x platforms. But the comparative counts can't be close, Mr. Neeley, especially if simple, critical thinking is used here. http://www.macdesignonline.com/issues/janfeb03/mac_lane.html Again, InDesign is NOT positioned to compete with Frame in ANY way. InDesign was created to internally replace Adobe PageMaker and to compete with QuarkXPress and its bevy of wannabes. InDesign is also still trying to financially recover from a patent infringement suit lost to Trio, Inc. in 2001. Adobe had to pull InDesign out of its marketing channels and off all US retail and educational shelves in late 2001... There's no way to tell how many millions of dollars as well as market positioning and credibility InDesign lost during that "hiccup." http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?webpageid=1797 http://desktoppub.about.com/library/weekly/aa012600b.htm "Adobe has devoted considerable effort to this new product, which it claims is the first new page layout program in more than a decade to be designed from the ground up. The company appears quite confident that InDesign will allow Adobe to capture some market share from QuarkXPress and others going forward." Does Mr. Neeley actually think and openly proclaim that ADOBE FrameMaker is Adobe's target and that InDesign is outselling FrameMaker either incrementally or in total units over the years? Amazing... BTW, InDesign's version 1.0 Adobe Classroom in a Book wasn't released until November 1999. In Design 1.0 (though 2.5) was NOT bundled with other Adobe products and is NOTHING like the current version of InDesign 3.0/CS-Creative Suite. During the same period FrameMaker has remained essentially the same very solid application - no frills and sadly no attentive marketing programs or significant new features. And oddly, InDesign still does not import much of FrameMaker's output. Hmmm... Obviously, Adobe is doing great - magnificent really. Adobe just reported a $430 million revenue fourth quarter; a 29% increase over the same 2003 fourth quarter. Adobe says that this revenue increase came from a combination of Acrobat and Creative Suite (CS) sales. Note that CS now INCLUDES InDesign. Just how many units InDesign is garnering on its own is murky at best. But perhaps Mr. Neeley can tell us all what these numbers are with crystal clarity and pin-point accuracy. The professional graphics design community has been lukewarm at best in its InDesign reviews. They don't say that InDesign is bad or inferior. But they frequently say that InDesign is no improvement over QuarkXPress either in performance or price. Learning to deftly use a new app takes time that these graphics design users are also unwilling to devote to InDesign - because they would be jeopardizing their jobs in their fast-paced, deadline driven work environment. Now that InDesign is CS-bundled, at least the pricing criticism has been somewhat muffled. But how does anyone know whether CS bundle buyers are actually using InDesign? Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign make up the standard CS bundle for $1000 retail. Add Acrobat 7.0 Professional and GoLive to the premium CS bundle and pay $1300 retail. Not bad really. By itself, InDesign costs $700 retail. QuarkXPress currently costs $945 if bought from Quark's online store and directly downloaded. Note that InDesign and QuarkXPress often require a number of fairly expensive plug-ins to be truly flexible and thoroughly functional. The best XML plug-ins for each application are VERY expensive. Some XML add-ons for Quark are in the astronomical price range... On the other hand, here's a blog criticizing QuarkXPress: http://design.weblogsinc.com/entry/7932727748437138/ And one last Google-cached InDesign vs.Quark page that really takes each of them to task: http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:1AmtKlRKD1wJ:www.digitaloutput.net/back%2520edit/sept04/ss2.html+market+share+quark+indesign&hl=en Finally, here is what most tech writers are wondering about: how does Word stack up against FrameMaker, Word Perfect and LaTeX? Has anyone tried Nisus Writer on the Mac? ;-) http://www.macopinion.com/columns/intelligence/00/05/16/ http://www.front-runner.com/pages/support/files/fm_vs_w_ck.pdf -phillip Palo Alto ----- Original Message ----- From: "David Neeley" To: "TECHWR-L" Sent: Wednesday, January 12, 2005 5:02 PM Subject: Re: Rumor about FrameMaker - is it true? ...I am not at all sure that Phillip isn't talking through his hat on the numbers of users, though, since InDesign is rapidly becoming the tool of choice for doing tasks that have previously been the province of Quark Express. In fact, InDesign was originally targeted to be a "Quark Killer" and, as of version 2.0 and later, it seems to have become so... David ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ WEBWORKS FINALDRAFT - EDIT AND REVIEW, REDEFINED Accelerate the document lifecycle with full online discussions and unique feedback-management capabilities. Unlimited, efficient reviews for Word and FrameMaker authors. 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