Adobe Systems has launched its latest version of its publishing tool – Frame Maker 8.0 and another e-leaning authoring tool – Captivate 3, in California. Both the products, and especially Frame Maker 8.0’s PCPBU has been completely designed and engineered out of the company’s R&D facility in India In an email interaction, Naresh Gupta, managing director of Adobe India and senior vice president of Print and classic publishing business Unit of Adobe Inc., told R Jai Krishna of CyberMedia News, the contribution of India R&D center in the new product release. He also spoke about the emerging trends and Adobe’s focus, investment and strategy in India, going forward. Excerpts:

He also speaks on the emerging trends and Adobe’s focus, investment and strategy in India, going forward. Excerpts:

What are the new features of Frame Maker 8.0 and how different is it from earlier versions?

The new Frame Maker is powered with rich media enhancements that enable experts and trainers to enhance static documents with rich media to create more engaging and interactive content. The Unicode support anchor facilitates authors to effortlessly publish a single document in multiple languages.

Frame Maker 8 streamlines the technical documentation process. Support for industry-standard Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) simplifies writing, reviewing, publishing and exchanging topic- oriented information in XML and the creation of DITA maps. Technical documents are now easily maintained, shared and updated with powerful book authoring and layout features, including automatic numbering and cross-references. A new feature enables technical writers to highlight edits made to the text of documents, streamlining the review process.

What was India R&D's role in the Frame Maker 8.0?

Frame Maker 8.0 has been launched for worldwide market with new feature enhancements. This PCPBU product is completely designed and engineered by Indian R&D team in our Noida campus. The previous two versions of this product were also delivered by engineering team from Adobe India.

Can you elaborate on the kind of innovation that is taking place and products developed out of India?

Adobe India started its operation in 1997. Today, the India operations form 16 per cent of Adobe's global employee strength and 25- 30 per cent of the global engineering strength. Adobe India's research center launched PageMaker 7 in 2001. This publishing software was completely developed out of India with an investment of around 35 man-years. This was followed by the launch of Acrobat Reader (for handheld devices). Many other products have been launched from India campuses since, for example. - Frame Maker, RoboHelp, PostScript, Acrobat Reader on Linux, Photoshop Album and Premiere Elements (versions 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0), Captivate, Contribute, ColdFusion.

Premiere Elements 3.0 making it to the top 10-list in 2007 is a testimony in itself about the talent and maturity of the Indian R&D team and innovation happening out of India.