FrameMaker 2019 release

Close to 18 months back, we embarked on this journey for the next release of Adobe FrameMaker. We had an uphill task at hand to deliver a modern platform. And we are really happy and excited to share with you the availability of new versions of FrameMaker (FM) line of products.

Adobe FrameMaker (2019 release) Launch Webinar

Register now for the Adobe FrameMaker (2019 release) Launch Webinar on September 17, 2018.

Say hello to FrameMaker (2019 release)!

Fast. Powerful. Future-ready. FrameMaker 2019.

FrameMaker 2019 release is designed to make your content creation and publishing experience even faster, more responsive, and more delightful. Here are some exciting new features and improvements coming to the world’s most advanced technical writing tool.

Table of Contents

• Down to the core. The FrameMaker Platform Update.
• Up to new heights. Our next-generation PDF Engine.
• With love to details. For a better FrameMaker experience.
• We love Germany. And Switzerland. And now also Austria. Like Duden.
• Images and illustrations. Better and faster than ever before.
• DITA? Make it YOUR DITA.
• Share your point. Or manage experiences. With support for SharePoint Online and Adobe Experience Manager
• Wait. There’s even more.
• Download. And play a full month for free.
• Farewell FrameMaker XML Author …
• Hello FrameMaker NEXT!

Down to the core. The FrameMaker Platform Update.

The FrameMaker 2019 release is probably the biggest, most fundamental and most comprehensive update that the FrameMaker platform ever got in one release. Enjoy a future-ready, cutting-edge experience that supports all the latest technologies.

• More power to you. With the new 64-bit architecture.
• Yes, the rumors you might have heard were true. FrameMaker 2019 is now a native 64-bit application. This does not only increase the speed in every aspect, it also makes it possible for you to handle even super large amounts of content with ease. Publishing ditamaps with thousands of topics super fast? No problem. Editing and publishing big documents with hundreds of pages and huge amounts of large, high-resolution graphics, scrolling through them smoothly? Easy with the 64-bit version of FrameMaker 2019.
• Now the rule of thumb is: The more RAM your machine has, the more fun it is to work with large amounts of content.
• Major upgrade of Adobe and Open Source libraries
• We have reviewed the FrameMaker architecture from A to Z and upgraded all Adobe Core Technology Libraries and nearly all 3rd Party and Open Source Libraries that we ship with FrameMaker to their latest versions. Today, FrameMaker has probably the most up-to-date technology stack among all content editing tools and is on par with all other major Adobe products like InDesign, PhotoShop, and Illustrator.

Up to new heights. Our next-generation PDF Engine.

The new PDF generation framework gives you the best looking PDFs. And total control on how you want to publish it. With the new PDF engine, FrameMaker 2019 creates PDFs “natively.” The PDF generation process does not go through printing to PostScript and Acrobat Distiller anymore. The new PDF engine is based on Adobe’s modern PDF Library – the same that is also used by other Adobe products like Adobe InDesign. The Publish pod now has PDF as one of the publishing formats.

• Color is key: Like Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Key. And like Red, Green, and Blue. All for you.
• While generating PDF output, you no longer have to select the RGB or CYMK color settings. This has been made possible because of the new PDF engine, which gives you PDF output as you see it while authoring.
• Print Settings. In all details possible.
• FrameMaker 2019 helps to reduce post processing required to set Marks, Bleeds, various printer marks to start with. All these options can now be configured with a simple User Interface.
• 
• Marks and Bleeds. All you need.
• FrameMaker 2019 helps to reduce post processing required to set Marks, Bleeds, various printer marks to start with. All these options can now be configured with a simple User Interface.
• 
• Protect your PDF. With 128-bit encrypted Passwords.
• PDF is the preferred document delivery format when it comes to sharing sensitive information. However, generating a secured PDF output was a multi-step process in FrameMaker. With FrameMaker 2019, it is a single click experience.
• 
• Faster PDF generation
• Generate PDF up to 65% faster with the new super-fast 64-bit PDF engine.

One of the big benefits of moving PDF creation option within Publish pod is that once you have configured the publish settings for PDF output, the same settings can be used to generate multiple PDFs. Also, the settings are stored in an sts file, which can be shared with other users to ensure you maintain a consistent looking PDFs across your organization, or the same sts file can be used with Adobe FrameMaker Publishing Server (2019 release). PDFs generated with 2019 release will have better 508 compliance than previous ones and ensure greater accessibility.

See this in action:

With love to details. For a better FrameMaker experience.

The FrameMaker 2019 release brings a lot of enhancements. For an experience that stands apart. We have brought colored icons back, introduced real-time progress bars that deliver detailed information. And we have updated the Welcome Screen for you to be more informative, organized, calmer and useful.

• Life is colorful. Or calm. Like you.
• Do you prefer a calm, monochrome user interface, if you want to focus just on your content? Or a bright, colorful UI? With FrameMaker 2019 you have the choice. Make it your FrameMaker. Make your experience more personal and switch between monochrome and color user icons as you like.
• 
• 
• A nicer Welcome. Say Hello to the improved Welcome Screen.
• We have updated the Welcome Screen to be more organized, more informative, less distracting and assist you with the content you are working on most often. Now opening the Welcome Screen is as simple as a click away in the Workspace menu. Open the Welcome Screen in a tab along with your documents. Or close it if you don’t need it. Mark your favorites in the list of recently opened files and pin them on top. And if you don’t want to see a specific file in the recently used file list anymore – just remove it with a single mouse click.
• 
• We generate progress. Informative and in real-time.
• Now know the status of tasks like book updates and PDF generation with information-rich, easy-to-understand progress indicators at every stage.
• 
• Find your color. Now made easy.
• Selecting a color should be easy and convenient. So we have added small colored icons to the Color drop-downs in dialogs like the Paragraph, Character, and Table Designer as well as the “Add Conditional Tags” dialog. This makes identifying and selecting the color of your choice much more easy.
• 
• Find your style. And elements. In all catalogs..
• In FrameMaker (2019 release) we have added a search bar to Character, Table, Paragraph and Element Catalogs. Just type in character by character to filter the list of entries in the catalog. Spot the style or element you want to apply quick and fast.

<table><thead><tr><th>Video</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td><a href="https://blog.adobe.com/media_c5480148e3ef32aecdd87fbe68705e287872823e.mp4">https://blog.adobe.com/media_c5480148e3ef32aecdd87fbe68705e287872823e.mp4</a></td></tr></tbody></table>

• Don’t get lost. Open Containing Folder.
• We have made it easy to get back in Windows Explorer to the folder where your document is stored. Now you can simply make a right-mouseclick on the document tab and select “Open Containing Folder.” This will open Microsoft Windows Explorer, pre-open the folder where your document lives and pre-select the file.
• 

We love Germany. And Switzerland. And now also Austria. Like Duden.

Say Hello to DUDEN! For high-end spellchecking and hyphenation.

FrameMaker 2019 introduces support for DUDEN-based spellchecking and hyphenation. This has been a customer ask for quite a few releases for the European market.

The new DUDEN engine offers support for 1996 and 2006 spelling reforms. You can set up the spellchecking engine to use the DUDEN general engine, a conservative engine, a press engine or a tolerant engine. And for hyphenation, you can configure the DUDEN engine to hyphenate “all but unaesthetic,“ “aesthetic,” or “preferred aesthetic.” We go into the details of this in a later blog post sometime soon.

And: FrameMaker 2019 introduces support for Austrian German for the first time in the history of FrameMaker.

Happy with the classic Hunspell Dictionaries and Hyphenation Engines? They are still available as well.

Images and illustrations. Better and faster than ever before.

One of the areas of focus for 2019 release has been to improve the image handling capabilities in FrameMaker. Be the first to take advantage of Google’s new WebP image format. Creating stunning visuals with the new image transparency feature. Fit images to frames or vice versa easily – proportionally if you like, of course. Easily import 100’s of images in one go – super fast. And scroll through graphic-heavy FrameMaker documents smoothly.

• Very web. Say Hello to WebP!
• Adobe FrameMaker (2019 release) is the first desktop content editing that officially supports Google’s new WebP image format (Google released version 1.0.0 of this image formaten in April 2018).
• If speed matters, WebP is a modern alternative to existing image formats like JPEG and PNG. It provides superior lossless and lossy compression for images. Using WebP, you can can create smaller, richer images that make the web faster.
• WebP lossless images are 26% smaller in size compared to PNGs. WebP lossy images are 25-34% smaller than comparable JPEG images at equivalent SSIM quality index.
• Lossless WebP supports transparency (also known as Alpha Channel) and lossy WebP also supports transparency, typically providing three times smaller file sizes compared to PNG.
• In FrameMaker (2019 release) you can now import WebP images and publish them to PDF and Responsive HTML5 websites.
• As of the time of the release of this blog post, WebP is already natively supported in Google Chrome and the Opera browser.
• Very transparent. Images with new possibilities.
• We are very excited to share that with the FrameMaker 2019 release, we do support image transparency. Now you can blend text with pictures or pictures with pictures across authoring and published outputs – PDF and Responsive HTML5.
• Very fast. Importing images.
• Enhanced Image handling especially for GIF, JPEGs, PNG, and SVG image formats. Now you can import 100’s of images in one go, and you would observe how easily those are imported within FrameMaker and even easier to work with the FrameMaker document when you scroll through the long document. With SVG, there would be a marked difference in the quality of the SVG imported image.
• Very vector. With SVG into the future.
• We have completely revamped the SVG import engine. With the new engine, importing even extremely complex SVGs is lightning fast now. And the quality of the SVG preview is providing a much enhanced quality for you as an technical content author.
• 
• Very fit. Fit to Frame, Fit to Frame (Proportionally) and Fit to Image.
• With Fit to Frame, you can scale the image up or down “the hard way”: The image will be scaled to fill the parent frame to both the frame’s height and width – even if that means it will be “stretched.”
• With Fit to Frame (Proportionally), you can let FrameMaker scale the image proportionally and intelligently: In this case, FrameMaker will scale the image up/down while keeping the height-width ratio intact. FrameMaker will scale the image only that much, until either the height or width of the parent frame will be filled – whatever will fit first.
• With Fit to Image, you can scale a frame up or down to surround all objects in this frame exactly.
• All three options are available in the Graphics main menu as well as in the graphic’s and frame’s context menus.
• Very smooth. Faster scrolling through graphic-heavy documents.
• We have completely revamped the image display and caching mechanism in FrameMaker (2019 release). Now scrolling through graphic-heavy documents is faster and smoother than ever.

DITA? Make it YOUR DITA.

Over the years significant investment has been made towards improving XML/DITA experience in Framemaker. 2019 release features such as Smoother XML authoring experience, effortless EDD creation, new packager technology, support for XSLT 3.0 and DITA-OT 3.0 would further aid in making the experience of customers better when using FrameMaker for authoring and publishing content in DITA or custom XML format. Not only would the file opening time be better for DITA specific files but also the new XML/Structured workspace makes it much easier to work with XML files. Some highlights below.

• XML file handling. Super fast.
• Quickly open or package DITA maps/files with a new file opening and parsing engine in the 2019 release of Adobe FrameMaker.
• https://www.youtube.com/embed/VQLpXMP3EuY?feature=oembed
• Send a Package. Fast and reliable.
• Quickly package your ditamap to a zip file and share it with other collaborators with the new packager which has been re-written.
• https://www.youtube.com/embed/L3g6Okzx2KU?feature=oembed
• Breadcrumbs and a more powerful Structure View
• Navigate easier within your XML document with new breadcrumbs on top of the XML/DITA file.
• Structure view has gone through some major revamp not only in terms of look and feel but also added functionalities around Insert element before, Insert element after, Delete element, Paste before, Paste after to name a few.
• 
• SAXON 9.8.3 Enterprise Edition
• Yes, you read that right! FrameMaker 2019 now comes with the latest Saxon Enterprise Edition bundled. support for XSLT 3.0 and a new SAXON-9.8.3 enterprise edition parser. A nice to have tool in the XML armor for developers.
• See the Saxon 9.8 Feature Matrix to learn more about the differences between Saxon Home Edition (HE), Professional Edition (PE), and Enterprise Edition (EE).
• Customize and constrain DITA. Easy, intuitive, personal.
• Creating a Structured Application for new users required some understanding of EDD. Although there are options to import a DTD and a CSS into an EDD, post import it required some more work to have the EDD configured and set up. With this release, for any user who is looking to use DITA 1.3 or Lightweight DITA (LwDITA), there is an easy user interface to create your structured application with DITA 1.3/LwDITA or constraints for the same. You can even import a CSS which gives you another way to get started by creating your custom DITA structured application.
• https://www.youtube.com/embed/Ow6pNlno4CM?feature=oembed
• Selecting Templates. DITA Styling made easy.
• More control on PDF generated with your DITAMAP which is WYSIWYG. With FrameMaker 2019 release, you can easily customize your output dita templates and configure some options whether you would like to generate DITAMAP as a Book with components or as a composite document.
• 
• DITA Open Toolkit 3.0
• FrameMaker 2019 also comes with an integrated DITA Open Toolkit 3.0.

Share your point. Or manage experiences. Or both.

Share your point. Work seemlessly with Microsoft SharePoint Online

FrameMaker 2019 now comes with support for Microsoft SharePoint 2016 or SharePoint Online. With FrameMaker 2019 you can now easily connect to SharePoint 2016 or Sharepoint Online apart from older versions of SharePoint that were supported in earlier versions of FrameMaker. Just set up the connection in the Connection Manager and you are ready to go. You can use your Enterprise or Retail login.

See how it works in this video:

The best experience. Manage your content with Adobe Experience Manager

We have also upgraded the support for Adobe Experience Manager. FrameMaker 2019 now supports the latest version 6.4.

Adobe Experience Manager 6.4 was recently released, and FrameMaker 2019 supports connecting with AEM 6.2, 6.3, 6.4, and XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager, version 3.0 and above. XML Documentation Add-on is Adobe’s DITA CCMS.

Wait. There’s even more.

The above are some of the major highlights of the new features part of Adobe FrameMaker 2019 release but not the exhaustive list. There have been many improvements in areas such as:

• High-resolution display support
• Better image quality when generating Responsive HTML5 output
• Generate consistent PDFs across Left-to-Right and Right-to-Left languages
• Improvements in S1000D support with FrameMaker 2019 and more
• Take advantage of px as a unit.
• Easily replace referenced graphics from the Object Properties Pod.
• Enjoy perfectly shaded colors instead of the old postscript pixel patterns.
• Use modern Windows file browse dialogs for Open, Save As, and inserting images.
• Enjoy much faster HTML5 publishing, especially for DITA.
• A new, faster installer technology.
• And of course many fixes and stability improvements.

Download. And play a full month for free.

Sounds all to good too be true? We don’t think so. We’re so convinced of FrameMaker 2019 that we offer you a 30-day free trial without any strings attched. Download it, start working with it. And enjoy the new FrameMaker …

Hello FrameMaker Publishing Server (2019 release)!

With the 2019 release of Adobe FrameMaker, we also simultQuickly open or package DITA maps/files with a new file openianeously launched Adobe FrameMaker Publishing Server (2019 release) as a 64-bit version. The majority of the features highlighted here for Adobe FrameMaker 2019 are relevant for FrameMaker Publishing Server as well.

Farewell FrameMaker XML Author …

With the 2019 release, we also discontinue Adobe FrameMaker XML Author as we have greatly enhanced the XML/DITA authoring experience in FrameMaker itself. Those users who have an existing Adobe FrameMaker XML Author license should reach out to techcomm@adobe.com, or their Adobe account manager on the process for upgrading to Adobe FrameMaker 2019 release.

Hello FrameMaker NEXT!

The 2019 release has given us a strong platform to work on the next release. FrameMaker is built on a modern and up-to-date technology stack. Today, with the 2019 release, FrameMaker is the most up-to-date software product and most advanced and powerful technical content editing and publishing solution on the planet.

A big THANK YOU to all our customers and partners who have shared their feedback with us via forums, on conferences, phone calls, and many e-mails. Please continue sharing your valuable feedback with us so we could continue to improve the product.

We could lay back now, just be proud of this release and relay. But we are already setting sails again to go on the journey for FrameMaker NEXT. To deliver on our vision to make FrameMaker even better, to constantly innovate and exceed your expectations with the next release again …

This blog post was co-authored with Amitoj Singh, Product Manager Product Manager for Adobe Technical Communications Tools – FrameMaker, RoboHelp and Technical Communication Suite.