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Depends. If you're asking "What's the absolute starship, with everything a
user could ever want?" then your answer undoubtedly is one of the Unix
flavors. We're pounding politely on Adobe right now for a Linux version, but
that's not even being discussed, much less promised. Still, Unix gives you
immense power to modify Frame to do almost anything you can imagine.
FrameScript on a Windows base isn't quite the same, although it does extend
the reach of Frame a good deal. Windows Frame supposedly has the same
programming capability if you buy the FDK. Right. On Unix, you can quickly
configure Frame to be the core of a whole new application, if you want.
We haven't used Frame much on the Mac, so I can't speak to that. But Frame
on 98 is a bit buggy sometimes, much more so than the Unix version. NT is a
little better.
From the standpoint of interface, it's about a tossup in my opinion. The
same controls work the same way on all versions. And with MIF as an
interchange format, you don't have to worry about too many oddities. Stick
to PostScript fonts and you'll be fine everywhere (so long as you have the
font on your Windows machine, that is).
You can't separate the OS from the app, unfortunately. To get its
cross-platform capabilities, Frame gives up some things. One of them is
graphics import. Frame can't import a huge variety of graphics, primarily
because many graphics types work only on certain platforms and can't be
readily ported over. TIFFs are fairly safe. EPSs are wonderful. But EPSs on
Unix are happy and warm,as they are on Mac. On Windows, EPSs may not even
appear on the tube due to having a Mac header. All of this explanation to
point out that while we generally run Frame on Windows, that's because most
of our OTHER stuff runs on Windows.
Does this answer your question at all?
Tim Altom
Simply Written, Inc.
Featuring FrameMaker and the Clustar Method(TM)
"Better communication is a service to mankind."
317.562.9298 http://www.simplywritten.com
>Don't want this to be flame bait, but...
>
>I want to try and start messing around in frame maker for personal
>experience, I have it for my Mac and my NeXT, I know it's also available
>for various unix flavors and microsoft platforms. I have an IPX (sparc) box
>that I could also set up too. Anyway, from people who've used Frame on a
>multitude of platforms, do you guys have any preference, separate from the
>OS platform itself??
>
>thnx
>Gil
>
