🚀 go-pugleaf

In October 2002, the (former?) development manager for FM at Adobe,
Lee Richardson, said the following about porting FM to OSX:

"My live content included comments that getting the product to compile
 and launch was a straightforward porting problem, but that there was
 a lot of legacy code that made use of low-level and back-door MacOS-9
 functionality, especially for printing and fonts. Rewriting printing,
 without breaking existing functionality, is a challenge. The Dev team
 is trying to come up with a strategy that is doable (and shippable)
 in an intermediate version. If it can't be done before the end of
 next year, there's probably not much point."

He also commented on OSX being "just another UNIX version":

"FrameMaker on UNIX is X11/Motif based for the UI and dialogs, such
 that it ships with custom versions of the XLibs and Motif 1.2. All
 the code would need to be replaced by Aqua-based UI code.
 Printing is done by generating an intermediate printer language and
 running it through fmprintdr.ps to generate PostScript Level 1. That
 would be replaced by CUPS-aware printing going through the MacOS-X
 printing model.
 There'd be some work involved in converting over the ObjectiveC, but
 that doesn't seem like a big deal.
 Complete replacement of the UI code and printing are the big deals."

We have no idea what will happen now that the development of FM
supposedly has been moved to India. Maybe they'll get more work
done on FM than previously, but I seriously doubt it. The core code
base of FM is so old and non-Adobish that it would take a very large
effort to modernize it for future enhancements.

My guess is that development of FM will crawl to a halt within 2-3
years. It may still be maintained, but other DTP software will take
over and be developed further (perhaps InDesign).


--
/Thomas Michanek, FrameMaker/UNIX/MIF expert
http://go.to/framers/