Interview with Martin Fredskov. By Bjørn Smalbro - FrameMaker.dk

Anyone who has worked with graphics in one form or another knows how dependent you are on the huge amount of cheap and good stock graphics available online. There are many stock sites with Adobe Stock, Deposit Photos, Freepik and many, many more.

I have been working with technical documentation since 1993. Thirty years. And during those years I have seen a multitude of wonderful design trends come and go in traditional marketing. Color scales going in and out of fashion. Typography changing, image styles changing, photo styles changing. But design in technical documentation has barely changed. Every text in Arial, same page design, same ugly clip art, same boring colors for everthing.

Adobe Acrobat Ninja - Book review

Adobe Acrobat Ninja is a handbook for all things pdf. 13 chapters and 328 pages will take you through a systematic and well organized tour into the land of the Acrobats.

PDF has since its inception grown into a sprawling and ubiquitous file format which helps users store, print and send files to each other across platforms. Devised as a kind of closed and final file format based on postscript, pdf has also acquired a creative dimension. You can change and edit most things in pdf files! It is all of this and much more which Urszula Witherell has put into writing in her new book, Adob Acrobat Ninja.

This hammer, this screwdriver, and these pliers used to belong to my father when he was still alive. I got them when he died, and they hang on the wall in my tool shed along with other tools. Some I have bought myself and some came from my fathers collection of tools. And some of the tools come from my grandfather.

I often use both the hammer and the screwdriver and everytime I do, I feel a sort of connection to my father. I look at the dents and scratches and get a sense of him working with these tools. To make a living, to fix things at home and for his many hobbies. They show the wear of that work.

I have to admit that I don't - really - like the term "content". Content is the word for handling information in large amounts. Big amounts of technical documentation, medical/medico information, financial information etc. And handling all that information and making it accessible, readable, printable, open for analysis etc is a business in its own, the Content Management business.

We do other types of designs than just industrial graphic design. We have an account on Redbubble.com where you can take a look at some of the designs we've done.

Check out these, and my other designs on Redbubble.com

https://www.redbubble.com/people/Gran-Oso/explore?page=1&sortOrder=recent

Designing for multiple outputs

Use the design option of Publish to create beautiful output deisgns for Adobe FrameMaker templates

Adobe FrameMaker comes with an option to publish your documents to mulitiple outputs like pdf/html5, epub and chm. The design of these outputs can be highly customized. Here we show you how the output designs of our Quiote Template look.

Should you upgrade to FrameMaker 2022?

Yes! Yes, you should upgrade to FrameMaker 2022, because it is reliable and you do need the latest revisions. FrameMaker relies on your operating system, other programs and other file formats and in order to make things work, you need to keep up with the times. And on a more personal level - you need to keep your resume up to date.   

... and here comes the actual Adobe FrameMaker 2022 review!   

Adobe shows great caution when it comes to updating and modernizing

Update of Hijuelos template

The Hijuelos framemaker template is by far one our most popular templates.

It is a template meant to bring into framemaker the joy of quickly starting to write and get work done.

While FrameMaker IS a wonderful tool, creating a new blank document will not give you much inspiration for writing, as it comes with next to no formatting options.

This is where the Hijuelos template comes to the impatient writers rescue!

Good news for the technical writers and communicators all over the world! The EU is going ahead with "Rights to repair" with the new regulations on ecodesign that took effect on 1 March 2021.

I work as a self employed industrial graphic designer. Meaning I am the one who has to figure out what skills I have to keep up-to-date and what new stuff I have to learn.

The world changes. All the time. New technologies arrive, other disappear or become redundant. 

When you are the only one to pay for your education, you learn to prioritize. I have found that it is worth it every two years to take a step backward and try to see the need for skills in a broader perspective. Doing that helps you focus on what skills are more important than others.

The long awaited FrameMaker 2020 is finally available! Adobe has just released it. Adobe FrameMaker is also a component of Adobe Technical Communication Suite which features FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate and Presenter. FrameMaker 2020 is looking good, and here at FrameMaker.dk we have spent a bit of time making a review...

1: Google is a Global User Manual for the worlds products!

So… your lawn mower makes a strange sound and won't start…

• Do you go back to your shed and find the printed manual for the mower? No, you threw it out of course! 
• Do you go to the manufacturers website and download the manual? No, of course not! Would take hours to find that silly stuff!!
• Do you ask Google? Of course you do! And Google presents you with a nice little 3 point snippet User Manual in the top of the search results: 1: turn button 2: move lever 3: etc. '

Did Google write that text? No - a Technical Writer did!

Part 1 -  Part 2 - Part 3

When the idea first had taken root in my mind, I couldn't get it out of my head. Tequila. Tequila and Adobe FrameMaker…

Part 1 -  Part 2 - Part 3

Welcome to the second part of three, of my business case: "Content Marketing for Webshops with Adobe FrameMaker".

As short note on the background for this project. I work professionally as a graphic designer on a daily basis with Adobe FrameMaker. And have done so since 1995. FrameMaker is a great, creative and versatile tool and an ideal choice for working with Content Marketing.

Part 1 -  Part 2 - Part 3

Welcome to the third part of three, of my Business Case: "Content Marketing for Webshops with Adobe FrameMaker".

Content Marketing is mostly about using the Internet and its all dominant search engine, Google, for pushing your marketing message. We mostly use the term "search engine" about Google, but Google is also a publishing engine. Searching

"Horno" is the name of this small, free Adobe FrameMaker template which will help you generate an ebook in the epub file format

The "Horno" FrameMaker template is meant for quickly and elegantly creating a fiction ebook. We have based the example ebook on famous feminist novel "The Yellow Wallpaper". It will make your blood run cold!

We have even included a settings file which makes things much easier for you.

You may download the template here!

I have used FrameMaker since version 5 when the first Windows version became available for Win95. FrameMaker has always been a solid workhorse, and Adobe has taken a - some would say very - conservative attitude towards updating the software. But Adobe FrameMaker 2017 is certainly off to a good start with an absolutely MAJOR upgrade!

Adobe sent Adobe Technical Communication Suite 2019 to the market in September 2019. The product will probably be upgraded again in a year’s time, and is it worth upgrading to FrameMaker 2019 now?

Yes, it’s a good idea to upgrade to FrameMaker 2019, and here are the reasons:

FrameMaker is definitely the key product of Technical Communication Suite. The package’s other products, RoboHelp and Captivate do not have the same amount of users and are more specialised products. The two heavy reasons for upgrading are 64 bit and PDF.

FrameMaker Users Denmark er en realitet!

I 90'erne havde vi en ret stor dansk FrameMaker brugergruppe, som desværre lukkede fordi personerne og virksomhederne bag, ikke længere magtede at køre gruppen. Den 16. november stiftede vi en ny FrameMaker brugergruppe, "FrameMaker Users Denmark" i Industriparken 23, Ballerup.