Hi Jackson:
Chances are he used Adobe FrameMaker: it's the industry standards for book
publishing.
Chris is correct, it is still available for the PC, and it will run on
Windows XP Home.
Adobe® FrameMaker® 7.2 trial edition is available as a free download from
Adobe. If you have a broadband connection you should download it.
There is a question mark in my mind as to whether FrameMaker 7.2 will be
able to open the format you have. Ten years ago, you would be looking at
FrameMaker version 4 or possibly 5. Version 7 should get 5 open, but I am
not sure about version 4.
To open the book, you must copy the whole folder off your Zip disk: a Frame
book consists of at least five files: often a lot more than that. The files
should be in ".fm" format. The "head" file will be "BookName.book" If your
author did the right thing, he would have anticipated this problem and saved
the book in at least one alternative format. You may find .rtf and .MIF
files in your collection. .RTF can be opened directly by Word. .MIF is
FrameMaker Interchange Format: it's a plain text file that you can purchase
import filters to convert to many popular applications.
As soon as you get the document open, you need to save it to a new format:
you should save it to FrameMaker 7 format (the software will prompt whether
you want to upgrade -- say "Yes"). Don't leave it in the old format:
otherwise soon "nothing" will be able to open it.
Then you have a choice of either saving it to another format (say Word
document) or buying a copy of FrameMaker. If you have a fully-updated
version of Word 2000 or above, I would probably choose to save the file to
Word document format. Your other option is to purchase the latest version
of FrameMaker (about $US800.00).
If you intend to be doing a lot of publishing (full-time, as a business) I
would buy a copy of FrameMaker. It is the tool that is designed for
technical writing and book publishing. If you just want to update your own
book, I would export to Word.
I assume that you already know how to use Word. Learning FrameMaker is no
worse than learning Word, but it is different. There is a lot to learn
(plan on several months of daily work and lots of reading of the manual
before you are good at it). Learning to publish books electronically is the
difficult part. If you already know how to do that, learning FrameMaker is
no big deal. If you don't know electronic publishing, it's a chore to learn
in either Word or FrameMaker. So stick with the product you know.
If you are going to be editing "books", make sure you have at least 50 GB of
free disk space and I would suggest at least 512 MB of memory on the PC.
There are enough dangers lurking without having your workstation suffering
fainting fits: and below 512 MB both Word and FrameMaker become very slow
handling large files.
Hope this helps
I have a Zip disc with a book I wrote on it. It was put together by
someone I hired 10 years ago. He used a Macintosh program - BookMaker
or something like that. I want to revise the book and republish it, but
I can't open the Mac document with Word (Windows XP Home OS). Does
anyone have any advise? Thanks.
--
Please reply to the newsgroup to maintain the thread. Please do not email
me unless I ask you to.
John McGhie <
[email protected]>
Microsoft MVP, Word and Word for Macintosh. Consultant Technical Writer
Sydney, Australia +61 (0) 4 1209 1410
