greid@adobe.UUCP (05/14/87)
I have been using Frame "Maker," from Frame Technologies in San Jose, for about a month or so now for document preparation of various sorts. I would like to comment a little on the program in a strictly personal, informal sense (this is to say that my employer does not necessarily agree with me). As a quick background, it runs on Sun workstations under Unix in the standard "suntools" window environment, and supports PostScript printers. I like it. I like it because it seems to be a perfect mid-point between WYSIWYG and "batch" document formatting systems. There are two ways in which it achieves this, I think. As a WYSIWIG system it is pretty standard; it has a nice menu and dialog-box style interface. BUT--and already here is one of the reasons I like it--you don't have to use the mouse if you don't want to. There is an equivalent key combination for every mouse-click action, and they are remarkably mnemonic. I also like the fact that you don't have to use the mouse to position the cursor (although you can, of course). "Maker" (as they call it, although everybody calls it Frame Maker) uses emacs-style cursor movement, delete, cut/paste operations which are WONDERFUL in case you've never attempted to put a mouse cursor between two 10-point italic bitmap characters on the screen. If you have, you know what I mean. It also supports keyboard macros and reprogrammability of various key sequences. I find I can actually edit text in it, which is something I have never been able to do on other mouse-intensive WYSIWYG systems. I can type fast and I like to use the keyboard. The other thing that makes it a good blend between WYSIWIG and "batch" systems is the style sheet/tagged paragraph/object-oriented approach. You can make up different kinds of paragraphs, and change attributes either locally or globally. It takes some care setting up the paragraph types, but you can get things done in a hurry once you have them set up. I have gotten so I can edit documents at the speed I'm used to with emacs without having to give up the niceties of WYSIWIG systems for formatting. The result is that I am "done" with a document a lot sooner than I otherwise would be, and I spend more time worrying about the contents of the document than its appearance. For those of you who have read any of the documents that I have written, you can see that this will be a big advantage :-) The PostScript driver is okay, but they are working on improving it. It uses the standard "lpr" mechanism under Unix, but still allows PostScript files to be diverted to the disk, which is nice. There also is a mechanism for including raw PostScript in a document, although it does not handle things like compensating for the %%BoundingBox and downloadable fonts. There is a separate "book-making" program that runs in more-or-less batch mode for pulling together tables of contents, indices, global page numbering, and other derivative documents. All in all, a very nice way to put documents together. I have not used a lot of high-end composition systems, and therefore cannot adequately compare it to them, but compared to Macintosh applications, it seems to have the advantage of much better keyboard support than most of them, with strong formatting capabilities and the distinct advantage of being able to run under Unix on a multi-tasking, multi-user operating system. I hope this review isn't out of place in this group. I am mostly interested in the position between WYSIWIG and more traditional styles of editing that are employed in Frame Maker. I find it to be just the right balance--I can finally get some work done. Glenn Reid