Example Structured Document Environment
Adobe's FrameMaker ® has become a very popular software package for publishing technical documents. Some of the reasons for this are:
Utilizes well-defined document templates
Generates the popular PDF file format
Supports extensive text and page formatting capabilities
Supplies a robust user interface
Maintains stable performance on multiple operating systems such as UNIX and Microsoft Windows ®
With the release of FrameMaker 7.0, the product has added more structured documentation capabilities. Older versions of FrameMaker could export XML content but were not able to import XML and document grammar for editing and then export again. (Note: FrameMaker 6.0 + SGML was a more expensive release that provided some of this support)
FrameMaker 7.0 supports both a Unstructured (traditional FrameMaker) and Structured (XML) environments. The latter is covered in this report as it provides functionality equivalent to standard XML editors.
The following figure shows the full FrameMaker window for our example document, the Schoolhouse Rock business letter, including controls, document and structure views.
To compare environment appearance, click XMetaL Environment.
Each active FrameMaker window has a toolbar on the right-hand side that is used to open a variety of support windows. While most of these are outside the scope of this report, the following figure highlights those that apply to this review.
