Adobe FrameMaker 9 Course

Hi and welcome to VTC's comprehensive Introduction to Adobe FrameMaker 9, an industry leading, powerful authoring and publishing solution for technical communication. My name is Bernard Aschwanden and I'll be your guide through this Course. We look at Adobe FrameMaker 9, which was released by Adobe early in 2009. FrameMaker's intuitive user interface, unified workflows and template-based authoring environment really help to simplify content delivery. It also makes it easier than ever to conform to organizational requirements for consistency and branding by providing powerful and stable templates. These are just some of the features that have earned it a reputation as a tool of choice by technical communicators everywhere. Of all the various tools that I use on a regular basis, FrameMaker is one that I'm in the most demand to teach. It's also one of the tools that I genuinely like to use. It's powerful, predictable and the more I use it the more I realize just how much standard templates can make things easier for me. I'm an experienced FrameMaker trainer, having taught FrameMaker since 1992. I'm also a regular user, working with it at least a few times every day. I've worked with most versions, including both FrameMaker and FrameBuilder which, in the early 1990s, were owned by Frame Technologies. They were acquired by Adobe Systems who went on to release many versions over the past 15 or so years. In doing so, Adobe has added new features, merged support for XML and structured authoring into the product and incorporated it into a new technical communication suite. This suite includes industry leading tools like Adobe RoboHelp, Adobe Captivate, Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Photoshop. Over the past 17 years I've taught FrameMaker to thousands of students across Canada, the United States and in Europe. I present on this software and on related technologies at conferences around the world on a regular basis. My staff and I also develop Templates, convert Legacy Content, build automated publishing solutions and find documentation efficiencies for clients around the world. We depend heavily on FrameMaker to make our jobs easier. I use all that experience in this course to show you what to do and what to avoid. This helps you by providing more than just a basic set of steps to follow. I provide you with a set of Best Practices to simplify the way you work with the software. I'll share with you, using simple explanations, examples and demonstrations, how to properly use the software in the same way that I use it on a daily basis. You learn to immediately use Templates to create a variety of documents within FrameMaker using the features of the application correctly. This allows you to create documents that have lasting value. The aim of this series is to provide concise, clear and complete demonstrations on how you can best use FrameMaker. We won't review every button and every menu choice in part because some of them relate to the development of Templates, not to the daily work of writing professional content using Templates. Instead, I provide a clear set of demonstrations to help guide you to the goal of using the software correctly. If you learn by listening and watching, a sequence set of content showing you how to perform specific functions correctly with plenty of relevant examples, this is the Course for you. Each video tutorial is self-contained and based on sample files that are available to you. While it isn't required that you watch them in a specific order, there is the assumption that you are familiar with earlier concepts as you work with later materials. Each tutorial is about 5 minutes in length, but some may be as short as 3 or 4 minutes, or as long as 6 or 7 minutes. Since this is all recorded in real time using software to show you visually what ..I'm doing and an audio track so that you can hear and learn why I'm doing it, you can see exactly what I'm doing and pause, rewind, or skip ahead as you see fit. For example, if I create a new document, reformat content, insert a new object, select and delete content, or display properties of objects, you can see exactly what is being done at the same time. If you have never used FrameMaker before, or if you're a new user, or even if you're an experienced user, this course is likely right for you. It balances a combination of basic techniques, best practices and shortcuts to provide value to anyone who needs to work with Adobe FrameMaker 9 to create professional documents including books, reference guides, user manuals and much more. All you need to get started is the software, familiarity with your operating system and the desire to learn.