Hoping to capitalise on the huge success of Sun Microsystems Inc’s Netra Internet server, Adobe Systems Inc and Frame Technology Corp, the company it is in the process of acquiring in a $500m share swap, are throwing their Illustrator, PhotoShop and FrameMaker 5.0 applications into a single pot for Netra customers to exploit as a World Wide Web publishing system. Adobe and Frame have created a Cookbook that shows how the three products can be used together to create illustrations, images, text and hypertext links – with automatically generated HyperText Mark-up Language code – for electronic publications. The three applications, which can already share Adobe Type 1 fonts, are being offered as a $4,000 bundle; separately they would cost $5,500. The Cookbook will also go up on the Internet for folk with the applications already running under Solaris 2.3 and above, the releases that support Display PostScript. FrameMaker 5.0 – the application that actually outputs documents for the Web – also supports the Adobe Acrobat Portable Document Format, however the packaged offering relies on the creation of a version of NetScape Navigator – currently under construction – which can view Portable Document Format documents. The two companies are looking at other system bundles, including ones for Silicon Graphics Inc machines. FrameMaker 5.0 is up on around 15 Unix and non-Unix systems. End-users can get the bundle from Frame in San Jose or from Adobe in Mountain View directly. Resellers handling the product are Access Graphics Inc and Merisel Inc in the US. Customers outside the US will have to go through Access or Merisel outlets in their own regions.
