Update 27 October 2024: Mastering ArchiMate 3.2 has been released. See here or go directly to the book’s page here. The remainder of this page is for historical purposes only.
This page is both informational and a request for help if you can.
Since the release of ArchiMate 3.2, the Mastering ArchiMate 3.2 upgrade policy has been in effect. In short, if I produce Mastering ArchiMate 3.2, if you have bought the PDF of Mastering ArchiMate 3.1 before the release date of the new version of the ArchiMate standard, you’ll get a discounted offer (past discounts were 50% or 67% — I set this based on the amount of change). If you have bought it after that release, you’ll get a free upgrade. So far (during all the releases) I have upgraded the book. But the promise only stands if I complete an upgrade.
And here I have hit a snag. I have (which. generally is my first step) updated the Mastering ArchiMate ‘cheat sheets’. After that I have started to work on upgrading the book. When I was about halfway (months and month ago), I ran into a problem with Adobe InDesign, the program I use to edit the book. InDesign started to hang when I worked on the book. At one point, I was able to isolate a reliable trigger. After that I started to do all the things I could to see if the problem was mine. Adobe support told me my file was OK, not corrupted. I got into contact with Adobe engineering and they finally told me this is a bug in Adobe InDesign and
- it has been put on the backlog for a fix, but that fix will have to wait for version 19.2 (later they told me, 19.2 or 19.3). Currently, InDesign is as 19.0 so there will not be a quick resolution. This probably means the bug hints at a deeper problem and requires some refactoring (I do not know for a fact, but I can guess);
- while they were supposed to see if there was a workaround for me, they haven’t given me one yet.
I am not hopeful. They have closed the ticket and are sending me mails with a link to the closed ticket, but when I click that, the ticket isn’t there.
As long as this is the situation, I cannot finish the upgrade.
So, if you have any influence at Adobe and you can help speed up the resolution, or the delivery of a workaround, please do so. Until then, I am stuck and no upgrade will be published.
Where does that leave us?
The free introduction of Mastering ArchiMate 3.1 (full syntax explanation) has changed and the current is no longer entirely valid. Most importantly, they cleaned up the Node-problem and this changes the explanation. For instance, critical remarks on this problem throughout the book need to be removed. Most of the rest of the book is still valid, but it is still painstaking work to go through everything and make sure everything is still correct. For instance, a sentence like “We cannot do pattern X, but we can do pattern Y” could change into “We can do pattern Y” or — with a change/addition of a diagram — “(and) we can do pattern X”. Such small changes can lead to huge layout changes in InDesign, which is why even a small change in the standard can lead to more — mostly layout — work than you would expect. And it was that layout work where InDesign has gotten stuck and the book is in a state I cannot publish until Adobe delivers a fix or workaround.
I suspect 99% of the Mastering ArchiMate 3.1 book is still valid (the maintainers tend to try to be backwards compatible so the tool builders do not have a lot of work).
PS. Don’t react with help telling me what fix to try. I’ve done them all, including different OS, different hardware, trying to migrate to QuarkXPress, etc. This is a confirmed nasty bug and only Adobe can fix it.
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