I'm normally a happy Adobe FrameMaker user and instructor. FrameMaker 8 has been very trying for me, however. In my production work, and for the majority of my students, FrameMaker 8 didn't give much improvement on the unstructured side. It did, however, offer up a number of issues. The biggest issue for me was the Frame to PDF conversion. Initially it worked, and then it didn't.
Hours on the phone with Adobe's Technical support boiled down to: "There is something wrong with your computer. There is nothing wrong with our software." (And I heard the unspoken, 'There is something wrong with you.')
Every time I tried to create a PDF on my Vista system, FrameMaker would crash. On my last project, my Frame to PDF workflow morphed into:
- Lay out the documents on the Vista system with the 24" monitor
- Back up to a portable drive
- Move the files to my XP system with a 15" monitor
- Print each chapter (there were 50+) individually to .ps files (because any other technique would cause a crash)
- Distill the PS files manually into PDFs
- Use "Merge files into a Single PDF" command in Acrobat to put them back together in the right order, which required making my husband read the author names out loud (actually entertaining because they were mostly Cuban authors and he couldn't pronounce them)
Needless to say, I was a less-than-happy camper.
Recently I came across a link that changed everything. The link will take you to a July 2008 post on the Group Wellesely Wire, a BLOG put out by Group Wellesley.
Here is what the post said (credit here of course goes to Group Wellesley):
"Some users of FrameMaker on Windows XP and Vista (including myself) have been vexed by FrameMaker crashes while generating PDF files, and generated PDF files with missing text (not good). The problem appeared to be random, affecting some systems but not others, and some documents but not others.
"The workaround (until now) has been to delete the file 'C:\WINDOWS\system32\FNTCACHE.DAT' and reboot. Many FrameMaker users would delete this file regularly, and some did so automatically through a shutdown script.
"Mahesh Gupta, Product Manager for Adobe FrameMaker, reports that Microsoft has patched the underlying font management issues that have caused these problems. His post in the Adobe Technical Communication blog provides details of the Microsoft patch."
And there was much rejoicing among FrameMaker users!
No kidding! Just deleting "FNTCACHE.DAT" allowed me to generate my first PDF from Frame 8 on the Vista machine in months! Hurray!
No kidding! Just deleting "FNTCACHE.DAT" allowed me to generate my first PDF from Frame 8 on the Vista machine in months! Hurray!
Microsoft to the rescue. Who'd a thunk? Hats off to Alan Houser and the Group Wellesley team for BLOGGING about this maddening issue.
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About the author: Barbara Binder is the president and founder of Rocky Mountain Training. Barbara has been a trainer for nearly two decades and has been recognized by Adobe as one of the top trainers in the world.