RE: Frame's graphics "tool"

["Fred Ridder" <docudoc -at- hotmail -dot- com>]

One must remember that FrameMaker was not developed by Adobe.
I cannot think of a single case where an existing application that was
purchased from another company has ever been completely integrated
with the rest of a company's applications. (For that matter, many
companies do a pretty poor job of integrating apps that really are their
own products...)  How many more licenses would Adobe sell if they
invested a quarter million dollars (less than two person-years if you're
talking loaded cost) to integrate FrameMaker with their graphics apps?
Unless it would sell a thousand additional brand-new seats of Frame
(or Illustrator or PhotoShop) it wouldn't come close to a positive
ROI (Return on Investment).

But returning to the real question, EPS works beautifully in FrameMaker
(as long as you can live with the low-res preview images while you're
editing), and can be both opened by and saved by Illustrator. EPS
saved from Illustrator and inserted by reference into FrameMaker is
our standard practice in our group.

Visio is *not* a great choice because its EPS export filter is notoriously
bad. Without EPS, you're forced to use a compromise file format like
WMF (portability and font issues), or some fixed-resolution raster
format like GIF (limited number of colors), JPEG (poor for text or line
art), or PNG.

My opinions only; I don't speak for Intel.
Fred Ridder
Intel
Parsippany, NJ