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I remember the joy of writing a 200 page book in FrameMaker on a smallish SPARCstation in 1994. Even in 1998 it was easy to convince my boss to license FrameMaker for Windows as writing software. Word was still too buggy to write anything exceeding a few pages or with embedded images with it. Sadly, Adobe never marketed FrameMaker to a mass market.

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They didn't because competing with the numerous low-end DTP solutions at a price that would make it remotely competitive in the mass market would have been fairly pointless for them.

And they still would probably have lost that market to Word for the same reason the whole stack of players that did compete in that market did: no one in the mass market is regularly writing and laying out books, they are either mostly writing documents of a few pages with the occasional longer work, or preparing copy and art.that ia going to be fed into some publisher's layout system.

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