Keynote prez by FrameMaker inventor, Charles Corfield at May 5 "Adobe Day" at #STC Summit in Atlanta. Describes how paper was the original "retina" display, key milestones in early FrameMaker development that made the product ready for rich media, multi-device publishing and XML. Also a vision of where "voice" input fits into future content creation.

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A Journey from Paper to Voice
Charles Corfield | CEO | nVoq, Inc. | www.nvoq.com | charles.corfield@nvoq.com

2. © 2012 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
About myself
 Charles Corfield
 Creator of FrameMaker
 CEO of nVoq, Boulder, CO
 Private Equity Investor
 Serial Entrepreneur
 Climber
 Long distance runner
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3. © 2012 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
The arc of technology
Paper
Structure
Internet
Mobile
Voice

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The birth of Word: HW, memory available
 1983
 Personal Computers with:
 512K of memory
 Floppy disk storage
 Windows not invented yet
 Word focused on word processing
only
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Only enough memory for word
processing:
• No page layout
• No graphics editing
• Very limited doc size

5. © 2012 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
The birth of FrameMaker: HW, memory available
 1986
 UNIX workstations with:
 2 megs of memory
 >10 MEGS of hard disc storage
 Multitasking operating system
 TeX and troff
 Manuals –1000s of pages, lots of
large vector graphics
 Workstations were used by “teams”
for collaborative authoring, not
personal productivity
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Enough memory for:
• Word processing
• Page layout
• Graphic editing
• Hyperlinks

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The early days
 FrameMaker 0.X
 Graduate student at Columbia
 First prototype on a Sun 2/120 in a NYC apartment
 FrameMaker 1.0
 Unified pagination and page layout (MacWrite + MacDraw)
 Symmetric treatment of page layout and paginatable text flows
 Target
 Long documents – replace troff & LaTeX
 Paper output
 Content creation
 By humans

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Content Management Issues
 First content management problems
 Internal references
 Footnotes, indexes, and cross references
 Markers
 External references
 External graphics
 Hypertext
 Managing variants of a single document – Single Source Publishing
 Variables
 Conditional text
 Frozen pagination & Change-pages

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Documents and Databases
 Boeing’s 777 project
 Store document content in a database
 Retrieve content from database, display in a browser
 SGML (Ancestor of HTML, XML, …)
 Possibly the first “web” delivery of documentation
 Consequences
 FrameMaker + SGML
 “Structure”, HTML, XML, DITA
 Server-based generation of documents

9. © 2012 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Presentation Revolution – From Paper to Mobile Devices
 Paper
 First “retina” display – sophisticated layouts to maximize the user-experience
 Computers
 Then – Displays had 72dpi – crude layouts,
 Now – Retina displays have 300+ dpi
 Back to what we learned to do on paper
 Plus dynamic content from hi-res streaming video and graphics
 Proliferation of platforms
 Desktop computers, laptops, smart phones, tablets, …
 Unix, DOS & MacOS  Windows, Mac, Android + variants, iOS, … (Unix lives on as
Linux/Android)
 Large diversity of screen sizes. Short life time of devices in the market.

10. © 2012 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Presentation Revolution – From Paper to Mobile Devices
 Impact on document authoring
 Requirement to produce both structure and rich page layouts
 Requirement to support dynamic content (video, animation, …)
 Requirement to manage content for consumption on multiple platforms
 Good news! – Already baked into FrameMaker…
 Other tools will struggle to manage and deliver as diverse content, for as many
platforms, with as rich presentation

11. © 2012 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Emerging technology – Voice
 Voice addresses the following UI issues:
 Screen real estate is full
 Add a new widget  Remove an existing widget
 Keyboard shortcuts are hard to remember
 How many keyboard shortcuts does the average user know?
 Touch screens  Slow data entry
 Tablets are a convenient way to present content
 Tablets could be used by mobile/ambulatory workers for filling in forms, if only data entry
were quicker…
 Key enabler: Speech recognition is now “free”
 MS/Google/Apple include it in their platforms

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Impact of Voice on Products
 Applications will start to support voice
 Initially as a “virtual keyboard”
 Visual tips/guides for “What can I say here?”
 Future – support context dependent recognition
 Impact on developers
 Developers need to understand grammars and language models
 Developers need to be familiar the human factors of voice interfaces

13. © 2012 Adobe Systems Incorporated. All Rights Reserved. Adobe Confidential.
Impact of Voice on Products
 Impact on product documentation
 Understanding how voice modifies existing workflows
 Communicating a product’s “voice experience” to end-users
 Writers will need a knowledge of linguistics
 Writers will also be users of voice!
 Interesting observation: Many technical writers have been exposed to structure and
linguistics, which is an excellent foundation for voice.
Prediction (and I am not committing Adobe to anything…):
FrameMaker will “assimilate” voice,
just as it has done with everything else…

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Workflow Optimization
Epilog – What have I been doing since FrameMaker?
Measuring Mt. Everest
Running the White Rim Trail in a Day USA Track & Field 50 Mile Champion
Breaking a Leadville 100 mile record

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Contact Information
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Information
Charles Corfield
nVoq, Inc.
CEO
E-mail
E-mail
Web
charles.corfield@nvoq.com (corporate)
cnc@lhotse.com (personal)
www.nvoq.com