TOOLS OF THE TRADE FrameMaker Turns 25 Interview with Inventor Charles Corfield and an Update on New FrameMaker 10 Functionality By MAXWELL HOFFMANN | Member The Past: Where Did FrameMaker Come From? market for academic positions in astrophysics, Charles In April of this year, FrameMaker celebrates the 25th realized that the market had virtually dried up, due to anniversary of its “birth,” in terms of the founding of shrinking science budgets, which had soared in the 1960s Frame Technology. Although Adobe acquired FrameMaker and 1970s. in 1995 and has successfully managed product development Desiring a career that would involve challenging, for the past 15+ years, it seems like a good time to revisit research-oriented work, Charles realized that he would the product’s birth and try to determine how and why this have to get his work financed; he did not want to rely on sensible publishing solution has remained a market leader the limited resources of the National Science Foundation for a quarter of a century. (NSF), which funded nearly all such research in the early Although Frame Technology had several company 1980s. “It occurred to me, why not just sell a product co-founders (Steve Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse; directly to the tax-payers, and cut out the middleman David Murray, inventor of FrameMaker tables and much of (NSF)? My next problem was: ‘what on earth’ was I going to the UI; and finance maven, Vickie Blakslee), I decided to sell to the consumer?” interview just one of the founders: FrameMaker’s inventor Seeking a business challenge where his strength as a Charles Corfield. Besides inventing FrameMaker, Charles mathematician could be leveraged, Charles canvassed several has successfully ascended Mount Everest, won several computer science department colleagues and discovered a 50-mile marathons, has his own Wikipedia page, and even need for an accessible, affordable, WYSIWYG documenta- has a courtyard at Cambridge University named after him. tion tool. “The Macintosh had only recently appeared on the How did this unique individual invent a publishing solution scene and was already influencing user expectations in terms with such lasting power? In Charles’s case, it did indeed of more ‘user-friendly’ authoring tools.” Even though Charles take “rocket science” to get the process going. saw a rich, potential market beyond the limitations of early “It all started while I was a student at Columbia in NYC versions of MacWrite and MacDraw, he could not find an in the early 1980s, working on a PhD in astrophysical fluid existing, affordable authoring solution that combined the dynamics,” Charles recalls. Taking a hard look at the job strength of both products. “It became clear to me that a www.stc.org intercom 11 hybrid product of these two models would be tremendously embed text that resembled a miniature page into graphics.” useful to people writing documentation that required a lot Charles realized that this could be done by creating of illustrations. Engineers immediately came to mind.” anchored frames in the text flow, or by handling unique page layout challenges with hand-drawn text frames that could paginate from one page to another. “I think it is possible that FrameMaker may have been the first desktop publishing product to fully meet the need of flexibly handling text in graphics for ‘challenging’ and high-volume technical publications,” Charles speculates. Critical Early Influences on Product Development Early FrameMaker product development had two key influences: (1) UNIX workstations with a multitasking OS for a hardware platform and (2) eCAD engineers as the first users, who had to create documentation that was thousands of pages long. Charles recalls an early visit with Henry McGilton, then the head of tech pubs at Sun Microsystems. At the time, Sun was publishing all of their manuals using troff and editing text with primitive tools like Figure 1. An early Mac desktop from the 1980s, as it appeared the “vi” editors, which were widely used in the UNIX world. around the time of FrameMaker’s birth. Sample TROFF-coded entry Charles got wind of the Sun Microsystems Catalyst This is a part of a file coded for TROFF, program, which loaned HW (Sun UNIX workstations) to the Unix typesetting program. A Perl fil- developers who had promising software plans. He pitched ter converts files structured like this to his idea for an “industrial strength” WYSIWYG word files that make sense to a WWW browser. processor that also did page layout and graphic editing to .Cs “* Ulva” indica “Roth” Sun. Soon, a $20,000 Sun workstation was being shipped .Pe to his apartment on West 122nd Street in New York City. \f2Ulva indica\f1 “It was a much riskier neighborhood in those days,” Charles Roth, 1806: 327--328 confesses. “I wonder how willing Sun would have been, had (type locality: \*QEx India orientali\*U they realized that their hardware was essentially headed [India \f2fide\f1 toward a college student’s apartment in a bad neighbor- Martens, 1868: 60--61]). hood?” The day after the UNIX-based workstation arrived, .Ts Misapplied name: Charles headed to a corner bookstore to buy a book on .Sy C-programming (it was just regular “C” in those days, not \f2Phycoseris gigantea\f1.--- “C++”) and a couple of days later, he began writing code. Martens, 1868: 60--61. .Id An Authoring Solution Gap Needed To Be Filled India. Charles realized that engineers and technical authors who .Qp had to create high page-count documentation with lots of Note: illustrations basically had a choice between two extreme According to solutions. There was code-driven, public domain software C. Agardh (1823 [1822--1823]: 407--408), like troff and TeX, and then there was the hefty-priced who had seen a specimen alternative of Interleaf, which was very weak in page layout in Roth’s herbarium, \f2Ulva indica\f1 Roth and managing anchored frames at that time. is referable to the plant “There was clearly a vacuum waiting to be filled with that has traditionally but erroneously been an accessible and ‘affordable’ solution,” Charles relates. called He knew that a different model was required to meet the \f2Ulva latissima\f1 Linnaeus (see \f2Ulva demanding needs of engineers and other technical authors latissima\f1 auctorum). with high-volume documentation needs. Unlike all MAC- Martens (\f2l.c.\f1) used the name or PC-based desktop publishing products of that time, \f2Phycoseris gigantea\f1 to refer to FrameMaker was intended for >1,000 page docs even before Roth’s record. it was born! .Qc “I wanted to treat text and graphics symmetrically. In other words, be able to embed graphics into text, or to Figure 2. Sample TROFF-coded entry 12 intercom April 2011 TOOLS OF THE TRADE “Henry held up the troff manual, thumbed through it and for hardcore, tech-comm projects. When working with said ‘this is what we need.’ That became our goal.” Charles multiple languages, any time savings in authoring or and the co-founders of the company realized that engineers editing are magnified by the number of languages in on UNIX workstations needed something that “felt” as which a project is delivered. Lacking space for a full intuitive and accessible as the early MAC user interface. product review, I’ll list some of the biggest time and money Because UNIX was a powerful, multitasking operating savers that FrameMaker 10 offers. For more FM features, system, the earliest working prototype of FrameMaker see our blog at Globalization Partners International, simultaneously handled page layout, word processing www.globalizationpartners.com. and graphics creation and editing. Don’t forget that this was still the mid-1980s, and all early desktop publishing Unstructured Authoring solutions on the MAC or PC required separate software 4 Style catalog management and find/replace format programs to do either page layout or word processing—not overrides: Search for any paragraph, character string, both at the same time. or table which has formatting that does not match the Although more limited in some areas of functional- catalog. You can use “replace” to eliminate the override. ity than Interleaf, the earliest releases of FrameMaker Paragraph catalog, character catalog, and the new table were priced at a fraction of the cost. As a result, the then catalog all have an options button that allows you to (1) UNIX-only product took off like wildfire, and was soon view only styles in use, (2) create custom lists of styles, or being ported to a variety of other UNIX workstations. Early (3) delete unused styles. One-click deletion of unused in the life of the product, the core code for FrameMaker styles is particularly useful for template building, when was made relatively “portable” so that it could eventually you may wish to only import certain strategic paragraph, extend beyond UNIX-only hardware. character, and table styles from a source document. Fast forward a few years to a strategic visit with Boeing 4 Suppress alerts, background colors, and drag-and-drop Computer Services. “They were designing the 777 at the editing: When upgrading older legacy documents from time,” Charles relates. “If Boeing were to have printed out previous releases (or when opening multiple translated all of the documentation, it would have weighed more versions of older documents), it can be incredibly than the aircraft.” Boeing wanted to break the doc set annoying to have multiple pop-up alerts that “fonts up into “snippets,” perhaps pages that could be stored in are missing” or that the “document was created with a database. “If a mechanic scanned a barcode on a part an older release.” Now, at appropriate times, you can of the aircraft, the database should pull in the relevant eliminate these alerts, saving perhaps hundreds of hours portion of documentation,” Charles continues.