a thousand furnished rooms

The features that caught my eye, included the following:

• Greater support for inline editing of graphics using Adobe tools such as Illustrator and PhotoShop


• Ability to open PageMaker and Quark Express files


• Some nice new XML capabilities such as namespace support, CSS support, better roundtripping of XML, and Unicode support


• Support for integrated SVG graphics

Karl Matthews, the group product manager for FrameMaker made an excellent point about SVG, and its applicability for localization. Too many images reside in what Matthews called "opaque binary file formats," where it is very difficult or impossible to get at and manipulate elements of an image. SVG, because it is hierarchical and an XML language, allows programmers to easily parse, navigate, and manipulate the image "tree" and all its elements. Thus, an SVG-encoded image could straightforwardly be manipulated to allow certain elements (captions, callouts, text) to be localized for different venues. So, along with the more obvious reasons to consider SVG for technical publishing (it's a vector format, it's scalable, it's cross-platform), organizations should now add localization to this list.