Archives

I had a recent comment on a post I wrote nearly ten years ago. The post actually earned me a bit of notoriety in the MadCap community. For many years after writing that post, people would see me at an industry conference and say, “Oh, you’re the guy who wrote The Six Things I Hate About Flare.” I would quickly correct them, telling them I was very careful at the time to not use the word hate. In fact, right after my actual post entitled “Six Persistent Flare Problems,” I quickly published a post on “Six things I loved about Flare.” I published in that order, because I wanted people to remember the great things I said about Flare, not the quirks that annoyed me. (Nobody ever commented to me about the latter post though, so that didn’t really go as planned.)

A lot has changed in ten years! As I reread that post I realized that ten years ago, I was using Flare version 3. Since then, there have been annual numbered releases, all the way to Flare v12. Then MadCap changed the release naming scheme, and moved to a year-based name, so we got Flare 2016 r2, which could have technically been called Flare 13, but now MadCap posts the year of the release, and if a new major release is released in the same year, they add the “r2” addendum so you can see what version you’re dealing with. That means with Flare 2017, there have been 11 major release of Flare since my “persistent problems” post ten years ago. That is a lot of time, and A LOT of new features.

Now I am using Flare 2017. For your sake, I hope you are using Flare 2017 as well. I’ve been using it since it was released in January, and I’m exceptionally satisfied with the new features in this release.

In the past, I’ve talked in detail about the new features in a given Flare release. I think in this post, I want to take a slightly different direction and talk about my overall satisfaction with Flare as a technical writing tool, based on over a decade of experience working with Flare, training on Flare, and presenting on Flare to large audiences around the world.

Let me state my opinion right out of the gate: MadCap Flare is hands-down the best help authoring tool I have ever used. Its list of features is extensive, and the breadth and depth of its features is vast. The power of Flare is in its ability to help you reuse content in many different ways. You can write once, and maintain content in one single location, and then use that content in many different ways for many different audiences. Here is a partial list of single-sourcing features in Flare 2017:

• Conditions – You can apply conditions to content, and then you can select a combination of include/exclude commands for conditions for each target that you build. (In the context of Flare, you can consider a target as a deliverable. It is a specific set of content published for a specific audience.)
• Snippets – You can reuse chunks of content endless times across your project by putting shared content into snippets, and then referencing those snippets when you need them in other topics. When you need to make a change, you open the snippet, and the content is automatically updated everywhere you use the snippet.
• Variables – Flare has support for several types of variables, allowing you to specify at the project level, or at the target level what the text of a specific variable should be. This makes it easy to create separate targets for specific customers where you can using the wording and terminology that is specific to that customer. Variables are also useful for items that may be used across the document, but may change over time, like the version number of the product you are documenting.
• Snippet Conditions – An advanced feature in Flare, snippet conditions let you customize a snippet for use in multiple places in the project where the content is similar, but not exactly the same. You can then edit the conditions that are used for the snippet at either the topic level (all snippets in that topic will use the specified condition), or at the point the snippet is inserted (allowing you to use the same snippet in multiple places in the same topic, but with different conditions applied.
• Snippet Variables – A fairly new feature, you can specify the variable text of a variable used in a snippet at the point of insertion, allowing you to set custom text at the point of insertion without having to specify the actual text in the variable definition, making it easier to use a snippet in multiple ways across the topic or project.
• Multi-channel publishing – A Flare staple since the beginning, the number of ways you can publish content is increasing over time. Flare now supports  two flavors of HTML5 publishing, both a traditional tri-pane output and a new “Top-Nav” output that works more like a traditional website. Other targets include direct-to-PDF publishing, XHTML targets, DITA, Framemaker, and Word (to name the most popular).
• TOC-embedding – In my experience, this is an oft-overlooked feature in Flare that allows you to single-source your TOCs and embed a TOC into another TOC. This means you can update the order of topics in multiple targets by editing the sequence in one TOC, and all other TOCS that use that edited TOC will automatically update. When you are working in small projects, this may not be too important, but for clients with larger projects (many I’ve worked with have dozens of TOCs; my main current project has 80 TOCs) this is a real life saver so that content in various TOCs don’t get out-of-sync with each other.
• Project merging – In many writing shops, different groups of writers are working on different parts of a project, and at some shops, documentation may be created for separate projects that need to be merged into a single cohesive help system for customers. Flare allows you to merge project outputs, giving you that single system for customers.
• Screen capture tool that uses conditions and variables from your project –  MadCap Flare ships a companion tool, MadCap Capture for free with each Flare license. Capture is a powerful tool that allows you to not only use conditions and variables in your screen shots (and they automatically get updated each time the project is built!), but it also keeps the content of the call-outs separate from the call-out itself, so you can edit call-outs, replace background images, and even translate call-out text easily at any point in the future.
• Global project linking – If you need to work in separate Flare projects, but you have a core group of files you want to use in all your projects (style sheets, master pages, glossaries, corporate logos, etc.) you can maintain those items in a ‘master’ project, and then you can link your other projects to that master project and import those shared elements. Any updates to the master project will get pulled into the other projects before the other projects are built, so they always have the latest-and-greatest versions of those globally-used files.

And that is just a list of Flare’s single sourcing features!

What else do I love about Flare? Lets talk about the user interface experience. Flare is designed with the technical author in mind, and has many, many features that make creating and updating content easy and efficient. For example:

• Customizeable user interface – Flare’s various windows and panels can be arranged in a virtually unlimited number of ways. If you have a wide-screen monitor or multiple monitors, you will especially appreciate Flare’s interface flexibility.
• CSS-based styling – This is huge. Flare uses CSS for styling both online and print output. While you don’t need to know CSS to use Flare’s editors, the work in the background is being stored in CSS, and you can get in and manipulate it manually, so any CSS you learn (or already know) will help you style your content the way you want in Flare. Can’t figure it out? Look at the literally millions of websites and hundreds of books on CSS to find your answer.
• Multiple editing views – One of the things I fell in love with in Dreamweaver many years ago was the split-screen view where I could see the code and the WYSIWYG editor at the same time. (This may be born of my love of ‘Reveal Codes’ from the old WordPerfect days.) Flare fully supports this. You can view just the WYSIWYG editor, or the text editor, or both at the same time. You can put the windows top/bottom or side-by-side. You can filter your current WYSIWYG editor by conditions, allowing you to see only specific conditions while editing. You can view your WYSIWYG window in print format (complete with pages based on existing page layouts in your system), or in web format (where you can even specify a specific media type). There are a lot of options, so you can work in the way that makes the most sense to you, based on the content you are currently working with.
• Dynamic preview – This is a new feature in Flare 2017, and I love it already. I have an extra-wide monitor, and I love having the preview of my content being updated in real-time while I’m working.
• Context-sensitive right-click – Depending on where you are, when you right-click in a topic you get a list of options. In a table, you get table-specific options. In regular text, you get different options. There are easy ways to insert links and cross references without necessarily looking at the entire list of your topics (a list showing, for example, all open topics, which can be quite useful in large projects).
• Drag-and-drop – When you need to insert content from the Content Explorer into your topic, in most cases, you can just drag the item from the Content Explorer and drop it in your topic. This makes it super easy to add content to a topic.
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts – Flare lets you create your own keyboard shortcuts for virtually every Flare function. I have keyboard shortcuts to apply specific styles, and others to run specific Flare macros.
• Quick search – The main project I work on is big. Really big. Finding a specific topic can be difficult. I can use quick search to find any file in the project quickly and easily.
• Quick-access toolbar – Like many Windows products, Flare lets me  customize the quick access toolbar at the top of my screen. I can even select sub-options (like a numbered list) and put them on the quick access toolbar making it very easy to find and use them.

And this is just a very short overview of what Flare can do. We haven’t even gotten into context-sensitive help, reports, the link viewer, group reviewing options, and integration with source control (including MadCap’s own Central offering). In my organization, we have our Flare project connected to GIT, which is connected to buildbot, so every time we check into GIT, buildbot generates a command-line compiled version of our targets, and copies the resulting files to an internal web server. Our developers and help authors always can view the most-recent content on the internal website, making it easy to review and approve topics.

In addition, I’ve had the privilege of being part of the Flare community forums for many years. That is a great group of people with a wide variety of experience and expertise who are willing to help users with questions that they have. The community forums, in addition to Flare’s excellent support staff, make Flare a very attractive tool because there are willing people who want to help you succeed in your project.

Are there things I’d like to see added to or improved in Flare? Sure there are. For example, I’d love to see Capture profiles stored in the Flare project, so they are available to all team members. I’d love to see more robust content management options for replacing live content on a schedule. I’d like to see a browser-based content review tool (taking MadCap Contributor to be a cloud offering) — something that might make MadCap Central a more attractive offering for a wider user base. I’m frustrated with side-menus in TopNav outputs not being location aware (if you have multiple topics used in the same TOC, only one of them is generated into the output, so the sidebar navigation is only correct for the first place the topic appeared in the TOC).  But these are all things I expect MadCap to continue to improve over time.

If we–from the outside–can judge based on the last ten years, it’s a pretty safe bet that there will be a lot of Flare goodness in store.

In the comments, tell me what features you think will be in Flare in the next ten years (Flare 2027(!), if the current naming scheme is continued).

There is a reason I’ve said in the past that MadCap has the best user conference I’ve ever been to. The MadCap team puts their heart and soul into making the conference informative, interesting, engaging, and fun. Such was the case again this year at MadWorld 2016.

San Diego is a wonderful place for a conference. Even when the weather is “bad” by their standards, those of us who travel from the north think the weather is wonderful. Case in point, the day I arrived, my Uber driver could tell I was not from Southern California because I was unashamedly wearing shorts in 70 degree (Fahrenheit) weather, with a chance of afternoon showers.

This year, the conference was held at the San Diego Hilton Resort and Spa. This is the third venue for MadWorld. The first two years were downtown in the Gas Lamp District at the Hard Rock Hotel. Last year, we were housed at the Catamaran hotel. Each location has had its pros and cons. The Hard Rock is in the middle of everything, and you can easily go anywhere. Both years we were there during a baseball game, which was within walking distance of the hotel. Last year the Catamaran was on the beach of the bay, and within short walking distance of the beaches on the Pacific Ocean. Transportation options were more limited at the Catamaran, being a long ways from the Trolley or other mass transit options, but the view was spectacular. The San Diego Hilton Resort and Spa is on the opposite side of the bay, backing I-5, so it was easy to get to. We took several Uber trips to area attractions including Old Town and Little Italy, and the trips were typically only 5 to 8 dollars. The hotel has an exclusive feel to it, and had a beautiful pool with hot tubs, and easy access to the beach. My only complaint about the Hilton is that there weren’t any restaurants within walking distance of the hotel, so if you didn’t want to eat in the hotel restaurant, you had to hire a ride.

As always, the conference featured full breakfast and lunch meals all days of the conference. The food was good, if a bit repetitive (breakfast, at least). If you are from further inland and north, like me, you can’t help but love the freshness and ripeness of the fresh fruit. Each evening, MadCap hosted a mixer event with free food (typically billed as appetizers in the program, but I found the variety and quantity of foods to be quite satisfying), with free drinks.

Monday morning’s keynote presentation was given by MadCap CEO Anthony Olivier with help from VP of Product Evangelism. Together they announced a new MadCap product called MadCap Central. This was the first MadCap had publicly discussed this product, and it looks like it will be interesting. It is a cloud-based tool that will feature project management and source code management. It looks like it will allow you to create roles in your organization, and then control access to edit or publish content depending on a user’s role. This was an early announcement of Central, and we didn’t get to see a live demo yet. I believe MadCap stated that Central will be available later this year. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this from MadCap in the coming months, and I hope that even before then I’ll be able to interview somebody from MadCap to give you more information.

As always, I’m impressed by the caliber of presenters that MadCap selects to present at the conference. I recognize that comment sounds a little self aggrandizing, since I was a presenter, but I’m talking about the other presenters there. Every session I attended was well constructed with good content. My favorite session from Monday (from a good list of awesome presentations) was Matthew Ellison’s presentation on CSS Flexbox. If you’ve tried to work with JavaScript libraries to do responsive layout, you will be amazed at how simple it is to use Flexbox. My first week back at work, I was able to wow my boss with a Flexbox based design for a new documentation homepage, using the techniques I learned from Matthew.

One Tuesday one of the presenters learned his father had passed away, and he had to leave the conference early (our thoughts and prayers are with you, Justin and your family). In other sessions, I gave an introduction to web scripting with information on how to incorporate jQuery plugins in your Flare content. Scott DeLoach followed that session with an in-depth discussion on how MadCap uses jQuery, and gave several jQuery libraries that you can include in your Flare projects to extend your existing HTML output. He had some great examples of things you can do including search auto-complete, and a plugin to turn a page into a PDF document.

Wednesday was an additional day of conference for those who purchased the Advanced Workshop. I gave the first presentation of the day on source control, and I have to admit, it was not one of my better presentations. I had been using one cloud-hosted source control provider until about a week before the conference, when I realized there was an integration issue with Flare 12, so at the last minute, I switched to a different source control provider, and there were hiccups in the process. I was grateful that the estimable Daniel Ferguson from SmartOutput (formerly Write Degree Communications) conceded to come up and help me on stage, as he was the one who introduced me to my new cloud provider. I hope we didn’t make source control look harder than it is, but I’m not sure. (It GITs better! — Sorry, bad pun.)

Finally, Thomas Bro Rasmussen announced at the conference the launch of pluqin.com (yes, that is a Q, not a G), a site where he will be selling plugins for MadCap Flare. The first plugin is still in pre-release but it looks absolutely amazing. It is called Style Replacer, and it has some phenomenal features. It will read your CSS file content, and then it will allow you to change all instances of one tag to another. It considers classes, and can even completely unbind all classes of a certain type.

Consider the following: If you have a paragraph style that you are using as intro text to a procedure, you might have code like this:

<p class=”ProcedureIntro”>Adding widget to the system</p>

If you wanted to change all of those, across your entire project to the H2 tag, you’d have a LOT of manual work, if you don’t know how to do regular expression searches. While you could easily search for all the <p class=”ProcedureIntro”> tags and convert them to <h2>, you would have a bunch of broken topics, because you can’t easily search for the correct </p> tag to convert it into a </h2> tag.

With Style Replacer, you can do this across your project very easily. It works on images, list styles, div tags, span tags, and more.

Best of all, Thomas promised that all plugins on his site will only be $30 USD. The time saved by using this plugin on a large find-and-replace project could pay for itself several times over the first time you used it. He says he has lots of other interesting ideas in the pipeline, so be sure to check his site for updates.

MadWorld was another huge success, in my opinion. MadCap does a great job of putting together quality sessions, a great atmosphere, good food, and a fun time. The conference is a great value. Whether you were there this year or not, you should make plans now to attend next year. It is a wonderful mix of “our people” that I have never seen replicated at any other event.

Hey everybody,

The 2016 MadWorld Conference is now in the history books, and I’ve been asked to provide my content from my presentations here on my blog. I’ve created a page where you can view all the shared content from my presentations.

This year I was asked to participate in the Lightning Talk session. To be honest, I had a hard time narrowing down my topic until the last minute, so I didn’t have any slides prepared for that session. Instead, however, I’ve taken my topic–Using Browser Tools to Understand Your CSS–and I’ve turned it into a short YouTube video (you can see it at the end of the post).

I’ll write up a conference wrap-up post a bit later, but I wanted to get my slides and other content out there for you as soon as possible.

Here’s my lightning talk.

Hey everybody! It’s that awesome time of year when MadCap releases the latest and greatest iteration of MadCap Flare. This year, we’re getting MadCap Flare 12, with a host of new features and enhancements that improve the authoring experience. One of the great things about Flare 12 is that there is a nice mix of features that help our customers, as well as features that help us as help authors create and manage content in Flare.

If you haven’t already, I recommend you peruse the MadCap Flare 12 page on MadCap’s website to see the features that they are promoting in Flare 12.  I can’t possibly comment on every new feature; I don’t have the time, and I’m sure you don’t have the patience (grin), so instead, let me tell you the features that I’m most excited about in Flare 12 with the reasons why I’m excited about them.

For the Help Author

In this section, let’s look at some features that make it easier for you to do your job. These are features and enhancements that affect your ability to create quality help efficiently.

Advanced Style Sheet Enhancements

In Flare 12, the Advanced Style sheet editor gets a welcome overhaul. Now you can see multiple media sections in your style sheet–at the same time! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made a change in the style sheet, then looked at my topic, only to find that my changes weren’t applied like I expected. When I looked back at the style sheet editor, I (eventually) discover that I was in the print media section, rather than the default section.

Flare 12 supports multiple media sections as columns in the advanced style sheet editor. You can pick which media types are visible, and as you scroll through one media section or expand a group in one media section, all media sections are synchronized, so you can quickly and easily see your settings across media types.

This feature alone is a good enough reason to upgrade to Flare 12, in my opinion.  (Click the image below to see a full-size version.)

In the image above you can see how I have three media sections open at the same time. Note that the font-family setting is different between the default medium and the print medium. Also note that in the third column, the font family option is grayed-out rather than in black like in the other two columns. This tells you that the setting is being inherited from another location; it has not been explicitly set for this media type. In this case, the font is being inherited from the default section for this element.

You’ll also note that the third column is a media query. That’s right – the Flare style sheet editor now recognizes and lets you work directly with device media queries! I’ve been doing this in the CSS code for a while now, so it is very nice to see this feature float up into the main Flare interface. You can define media queries in Flare, and you can view and edit those that have previously been defined. If you aren’t familiar with media queries, they are a feature of CSS 3 that allows the browser to deliver different CSS settings when certain conditions are met. In the screen shot above, the settings defined for this media query will show up when the user is on a screen, and the width of the browser window is smaller than 500 pixels. There is a lot on the web about media queries, so I won’t try to teach it all here. The key phrase to search on is ‘media queries.’

Also of note in the advanced style sheet editor is a new section in the bottom left that shows you any comments you’ve made for a style, as well as information about the property you have selected. It’s inline help for CSS in the editor, which is pretty nifty.

Finally, there is a cool new feature available in the advanced style sheet editor: you can link a style to a condition. When I first saw this feature, I wasn’t sure exactly how it would be helpful. Now that I’ve spent time working with it, I’m pretty excited about it. A lot of my clients have certain content that should only be viewed by help authors (notes to self, sources of information, etc.). They have other types of content that should only be viewed by people internal to their company (bug numbers or feature request numbers that were responsible for certain changes in the content, etc.). In the past, you’ve had to do two things to make this work. First, you have to apply a condition to this content so that it won’t get included in the wrong output types. Second, you’ve (optionally) had to apply a style to this content so it stands out when you are working on the content in Flare. Now, you can just apply the condition to style in the style sheet, so that whenever you use that style, the linked condition is invoked. If I have a paragraph style for “do not distribute” content with font in bright red, or something, I can apply the condition to the style, so that any time I use that style, that content always uses the associated condition.

If you are looking for that style setting, it is kind of hidden. Open a style in the advanced style sheet editor, view the All Properties option, and expand the “Unclassified” group. You’ll see a setting: mc-conditions, with a menu button to choose which conditions apply to this style.

Flare 12 also introduces support for style IDs. In the past, Flare’s editor would only work with style classes. Now throughout the system you can now either apply and work with classes and IDs, giving you more powerful control over your layout, and allowing you to use the semantically-correct constructs how they were designed in CSS and HTML.

Single Sourcing Enhancements

Flare 12 provides a lot of new features and enhancements related to content single sourcing that advanced users of Flare are going to absolutely love. If you’ve used snippet conditions in the past, Flare has new snippet condition superpowers. In the past, when you inserted a snippet into a topic, you would then open the topic properties, and specify which conditions would be applied to all snippets in that topic. Now, you can set snippet conditions separately for each snippet that is inserted into a document. That means, you could use the same snippet in two places in the same topic, and get different information from the snippet, based on the conditions applied to the snippet each time it was inserted.

Snippets can also now be pinned, so you can keep track of your most-commonly used snippets and find them easily. In addition, the insert snippet window also shows you the most recently used snippets, making it easy to find recent snippets and insert them into a new location.

Another new feature tied to snippets includes the ability to set variable definitions for snippitized content when the snippet is inserted into the topic. So if you have a snippet that has installation location for Windows and Linux, you can insert the snippet once, and set the variable definition to be the Windows installation location, and you can insert the snippet a second time, and set the variable definition of the second snippet to be the Linux installation location.

In the past you’ve had to have separate glossary files if you wanted to only generate some glossary terms for a given output. Now you can actually apply conditions to glossary terms within the glossary editor, so you could conceivably have a single glossary file that generates many different outputs depending on the conditions applied to the target that uses the glossary file. Another enhancement in the glossary is the ability to add variables to either a glossary term, or a glossary definition, giving you more powerful single-sourcing capability with your variables.

Links and Cross References

When you are creating links to content, you’ve traditionally had to either link to a heading in a document, or go into the target in advance and create a bookmark that you can link to. In Flare 12, there are additional options when you create a link or cross reference to a topic in the help system. The link window now shows a variety of items you can link to, including individual paragraphs, ordered list items, unordered list items, drop-downs, expanding text, or even stylized items. When you select one of the items here, Flare opens the target topic and generates the bookmark automatically, saving you a step, and making the process of creating links or cross references much simpler and faster.

This new feature is available wherever the select bookmark window appears, including in the TOC, links, cross references, etc.

Flare 12 addresses an issue from previous releases related to cross references with variables. In previous releases, if you created a cross reference, and the target heading had a variable in it, the variable text was ignored and left out of the heading. So, for example, if the target heading had “Discover <Product Name>’s New Features” where “<Product Name>” was a variable, a cross reference to that heading would be generated as “Discover ‘s New Features”. That bug has been resolved, so cross references to content with variables now render with the variables as you would expect.

Responsive Layout Editor

If you want to create responsive layout in Flare’s editor, there is a new editing panel for working with responsive layouts. Flare will create the divs and help you style them so that content can move dynamically on the page, based on the viewport size. I anticipate that this will be widely used for creating home pages with TopNav output, but I don’t know how often the average user will be working with this panel. Creating responsive layouts doesn’t seem to me to be something that you are likely to do for individual help pages in your system, so this seems most useful for the main landing page in the product, but it is nice to see this functionality baked into Flare.

64-bit Support

Flare is now a 64-bit application. This means Flare will be better able to access the resources available to a 64-bit operating system and its programs (utilizing 4GB of RAM or more, for example). In theory, this should make Flare run faster even when you are asking it to do memory-intensive tasks. In practice, I have a pretty powerful machine and I don’t see any noticeable difference between versions 11 and 12, but I’ve seen reports from some users who say Flare 12 is significantly faster for them, so your mileage may vary here.

The move to 64-bit may cause some people heartburn, because MadCap is not publishing a 32-bit version, as far as I am aware. Comments in the MadCap forum suggest that people who want a 32-bit version are being asked to contact MadCap Support directly. It will be interesting to see if there is a 32-bit version, or if those using 32-bit operating systems will need to stick with Flare 11.

Update: (3/17/2016) It appears there is a 32-bit version, but you need to contact MadCap to get it. 

GIT Support for SSH

There are several new features in terms of source control, but the one I was most excited about was an SSH connection for GIT source control. Our GIT repository can only be accessed via SSH, so we couldn’t use the previous GIT integration with Flare. In the end, I still couldn’t get Flare 12 to authenticate with GIT (GIT was returning authentication errors), but our team already widely uses Smart GIT, so I didn’t pursue the issue.

Something new in Flare 12 for source control in general is that Flare now recognizes if a project is bound to source control when you open a project file. If Flare detects that a project is connected externally to source control, Flare will give you the option to automatically set up source control in Flare. This is nice if you want to automatically connect, but I suppose that if you DON’T want to connect the two, this dialog would get old quickly, and I haven’t seen a way to turn it off (yet).

XML Editor Enhancements

There are several enhancements to the XML editor. First, the XML editor now lets you choose any of your media types in the Media drop down list. This means you can easily switch your WYSIWYG editor to show you how the topic might be rendered in mobile, or tablet view, or even based on a media query, if you have one defined in your style sheet, which is pretty handy.

My other favorite enhancement to the XML editor is Flare has simplified the process of inserting drop-down text. Previously, you would write your content, and then you would select the entirety of the content that would be in the drop-down. Then you would click on the drop-down button, and Flare would verify that you wanted the first ‘paragraph’ to be the drop-down head, and the rest of the content as the drop-down body. Now Flare skips that last step. It automatically converts the first ‘paragraph’ into the drop-down header, and puts the rest of the content into the drop-down body. A minor change, but it saves a click and makes the process that much faster.

For the Help System Users

So lets take a few minutes and review some features that make our output even more awesome for our customers/users. 

Runtime Skins

Runtime skins allow you to change the skin that is being applied to the topic via a parameter you pass through the URL. Madcap’s main help example shows how users could switch their skin by clicking a button in the interface. While this is interesting, I don’t think it is as practical as the next example, which is allowing you to call, via URL a specific skin. So you can have a plain skin, that doesn’t have a header or menu or whatever, and you can link to that for field-level context-sensitive help. But main links open in the regular skin. This isn’t groundbreaking in terms of new functionality, but it does improve the experience for our customers.

Word Enhancements

If you generate Word output, check out the features list for Word from Flare 12. There are a host of new features including how Flare treats floated DIVS, rendering of transparent PNGs in Word, as well as the ability to take tracked changes from Flare and convert them into Tracked Changes in Word (which isn’t useful for your customer, but can potentially be very useful for reviewers.

Multilingual Output

I haven’t worked very often in multi-lingual projects, but for those of you who do, you will be very interested to see how Flare 12 improves your workflow. Flare will now render multiple languages for each of Flare’s output types. The language tab in the target lets you select multiple languages (via linked targets), and specify which order they are built in the target.

Smart Quotes per language

Many Americans may be surprised to learn that quotation marks vary by language. In the past, Flare has just inserted American-style quotes into your content. Flare 12 is smarter, and based on the topic’s language, Flare uses smart quotes that are applicable to the language. It is important to know that Flare doesn’t automatically fix existing quotes in a project. It takes new quotes and applies the smart quote feature as the quotation mark is inserted into the topic. If you want to update the quotes in your project, MadCap recommends that you use “Find and Replace in Files” to search for the existing quotes (either smart or straight) and replace them with smart quotes.

Conclusion

I’ve been using Flare 12 for about a month and a half, and I’ve been very pleased with this release. There are features in this release that make an immediate positive impact on our documentation team, and I can see how they are going to benefit many longtime (and new!) Flare users. If I were using Flare 10 or older, Flare 12 is an obvious upgrade. If you’re using Flare 11, you may wonder whether you should upgrade or not. If it were up to me, I’d upgrade from 11 for a couple of killer features: (1) advanced style sheet editor, and (2) single-sourcing enhancements. Flare 12 also corrected the annoying bug for variables in cross reference titles, which made our doc team lead shout for joy.

If you are interested in learning more about Flare 12, I encourage you to visit MadCap’s website where you can see the new features, as well as see some upcoming webinars on the new features that are included in Flare 12. In addition, I wrote a separate article on Flare 12 that will be appearing in the April 2016 Intercom magazine from the Society for Technical Communication.

What are your favorite features in Flare 12? Let us know in the comments!

—-

Edit: 3/17/2016 – Hat tip to Austin Wright for pointing out some typos that have now been corrected.

As many of you are probably already aware, I’ll be presenting again at this year’s MadWorld Conference in San Diego. Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a preview of each of my sessions for the conference. This serves two purposes. First, if you are considering going to MadWorld, I highly recommend it, and I hope my session descriptions will encourage you to register. Second, if you are going, I hope my descriptions will help you know if the session will be useful for you.

I’ll discuss my sessions in the order they’re being presented at MadWorld, which means I start with “Top Five Content Reuse Features in MadCap Flare,” which I’m presenting on Monday (April 11) at 11:05am.

First, this session is for the brand new Flare user, who is still working on understanding basic functionality in MadCap Flare. I’m going to talk about the following features in Flare:

Variables. We’ll discuss what variables are (unformatted text that can change definition based on target), how to create them, and how to use them effectively in Flare.

Conditions. We’ll discuss how conditions work in Flare, where you apply the conditions (based on file type), how to create and edit conditions, and I’ll give you some best-practice advice for working with conditions. I’ll show you how to customize your Flare 11 editor to show specific conditions while editing a topic, and cover how you use conditions in your target files.

Snippets. In this section we’ll define snippets and explain what they are and how they can be used. We’ll discuss how you edit snippets, see where snippets are being used, and we’ll show you how to use snippets for boilerplate features like tables.

Snippet Conditions. I’ll introduce the class to an advanced use of snippets where you can use conditions in the snippets themselves, and then you can determine which conditions from the snippets are used at the topic level.

Flare 12 Enhancements (hopefully). I expect that before MadWorld, MadCap will continue their tradition of releasing the latest and greatest version of Flare. I assume it will be called Flare 12, based on past experience with Flare. In this section, we’ll talk about any enhancements to the above features that are released as part of the latest MadCap Flare version. (If a new version isn’t released before the conference, or if there isn’t anything new to talk about here, I’ll talk about using nested TOCs in a multi-author project.)

I’m excited about this presentation. I love helping new Flare users understand how they can apply some of the features that make MadCap Flare the best help authoring tool on the market (IMHO).

If you are on the fence about attending the conference, I recommend you check out the conference website and see all the great presentations that are being given at the conference.

In case you missed it, registration is now open for the MadWorld 2013 conference. Join me and a host of industry experts for what promises to be an informative and useful  conference. This conference includes sessions like the following:

• Handling translation work flows through Flare and Lingo
• Integrating with a CMS and publishing to DITA
• Customizing HTML5 output to match your company’s style
• Advanced single sourcing using snippets, variables, conditions and snippet conditions
• Writing help in an agile software environment
• Global project linking vs. external resources
• and more!

The conference is being held at the Hard Rock hotel in downtown SanDiego. You really don’t want to miss this!

Visit MadCap’s registration site for more information. Book by August 15th to save $100 off your registration fee.

http://www.madcapsoftware.com/events/madworld/

You heard it here first! MadCap Software is announcing a new technical communication conference. Called “MadWorld” this conference looks like it will be a great event, especially for those who are MadCap customers. Here is a link to the e-mail message MadCap sent out for the announcement.

Save the date, and begin planning for this conference in your 2013 budgets, because this is a conference you aren’t going to want to miss.

Call for speakers is now open

Are you willing to share your expertise at the MadWorld conference? MadCap is now accepting speaking proposals for the conference. Join me in submitting your great proposals for possible inclusion in the conference. (My proposal is already submitted!)

Submit your proposal today (here).

MadCap is looking for presentations on any MadCap-related or non-tool-specific skills and techniques. Sessions are 45 or 60 minutes. Speakers get complimentary registration and travel and hotel accommodations.

When you are working in Flare (all versions) you often need to add a new topic to your project.

There are several ways you can do this: (1) From the Content Explorer; (2) Using a keyboard shortcut; (3) From the File menu (or Ribbon Tab, in V8); and (4) from a TOC.

Each of these methods has its advantages, but for most Flare users, I think you should be using the fourth method. Let me explain why.

In most of my projects, I work with a single TOC. Even if I have a simple and advanced version of a document, I try to always keep my content in a single TOC. The reason for this is simple: I’m using Flare because of its powerful single-sourcing capability. We’ve discussed at length the single-sourcing you can do in Flare within your topics, but the TOC is another place where you can utilize the concept of single-sourcing to reduce duplication and prevent out-of-date problems with duplicated content.

Using conditions, you can use a single TOC for both your online and print deliverables. At the TOC-entry level, you can conditionalize the entry to only appear in certain outputs. In my TOC, my frontmatter and appendix files (glossary, index) are marked with the “print only” condition. When I build an online version of the book, these entries in the TOC are ignored.

Since I only have one TOC, the best way for me to create topics is to create them in the TOC. When I do this, I ensure all my new topics get added to the TOC. Were I to add the topic in one of the first three methods mentioned above, I would have to manually add the new topic to the proper TOCs. Starting in the TOC saves me that step, so I don’t have to remember to do it.

How do you add a topic from within the TOC?

1. Open a Flare project in any version of Flare.
2. Open the TOC that will contain your new topic.
3. Right-click the topic just before the location where you want to add the new topic.
4. From the context menu, click “Link to New Topic…”
   
5. In the “Add File” dialog box, add the topic like you normally would.
6. When you are done selecting options on the dialog, click “Add.”

The new topic appears as a sibling to the topic you selected. To make the new topic a child of the topic before it, use the arrow buttons in the tool bar to move the topic to the right.

This method does double-duty; it creates the topic and adds it to the TOC. This method won’t work for you if you don’t want your new topic to appear in the TOC (obviously), and if your new topic needs to appear in multiple TOCs, you will still need to add it manually to the other TOCs where you want it to appear.

I’ve found that using this method makes it so I don’t forget to add topics to the TOC, which saves me time and effort in the long run.

Hope it helps you too!

Note: This procedure creates the topic at the root level of your project, as Flare doesn’t know where you want the topic saved. You can easily move the file by opening the Content Explorer, and dragging the new file to the folder where you want it stored. This doesn’t affect the project, but if you like to keep your topics organized in folders, you will want to drag it to the correct folder.

Today MadCap Software released version 8 of its flagship help authoring tool, MadCap Flare, and I think there is a whole lot to like about it. I was lucky enough to be a beta tester for Flare v8, and I’m excited to share with you some of the great new features you’ll find in v8. Click the link or scroll down to read about each of these features.

• New User Interface
• Contributor Free review mode
• Subfolders in Project Organizer
• HTML5 Output
• PDF and Print Output improvements
• e-Pub Output
• Import enhancements for DITA, Word, and Framemaker
• DITA 1.2 support
• Improvements to Conditions/Variables
• New licensing model

The first thing you’ll notice when you open Flare v8 is that the interface has been completely re-designed. By default, Flare 8 has a new ribbon-based layout. While there are some who have lamented this change in Microsoft’s line of products, I actually have liked the ribbon since it was introduced. It makes a lot of options easier to find, and reduces the number of clicks I have to make. I have loved using the ribbon interface in Flare 8. It makes me faster at doing common things like accessing document properties, using find-and-replace, creating a snippet, etc.

I do know that there are “ribbon haters” out there, and if you are one of them, you can change a setting in Flare to retain the old UI. To do that, click on the File tab, then click the Options button (see graphic, right). There you can select either the Ribbon menu style, or the Tool Strip menu style. You can also change the active theme (Black, Classic, or Silver). I quite like the Black theme, with Silver being my second choice.

So the new UI looks nice, but if you aren’t a fan, MadCap has provided an option for you to retain the classic interface.

Contributor Free review mode

This feature is HUGE for me. When Flare 7 was released, MadCap retired the X-Edit line of tools and released a new tool called Contributor which replaced the three versions of X-Edit. Contributor is a great tool, but when it was released, there was only one version, and it was a paid version. That meant I needed to purchase a license of Contributor for EVERY person who would be reviewing content from my project, no matter how large or small their contribution. Our management wasn’t willing to shell out the money for Contributor licenses for all our reviewers, so we were in a bind. No more.

With Flare 8, Contributor has a new release that has a free-review mode. When you open Contributor, you can either enter a license key, or you can use it in “review” mode. SMEs and managers can provide annotated comments to the document they are reviewing. The review mode never expires, so the reviewers will never need to purchase a copy of Contributor. If they DO purchase a Contributor license, they can make changes (with a track-changes-like functionality) to the document during the review.

Contributor can also cost the organization a lot less money now, with some of the new licensing options, which are described in a later section of this review.

Sub-folders in Project Organizer

This may seem like a trivial option, but I’m really excited about Flare 8’s ability to have sub-folders in the Project Organizer. At a previous company, I was documenting four related products in the same Flare project. I had several different TOCs, and each product had several different targets. One product had its own set of variables that was distinct from the other variables in the other product lines. I had a variety of reports, and the reports were different for each product line. Needless to say, the Project Organizer seemed anything but “organized.”

Flare 8 lets you add sub-folders in each of the Project Organizer folders. In my example, I could have created a sub-folder for each of my product lines so I could organize my TOCs, Reports, Targets, etc. by product line. For those of you working with large products with “messy” Project Organizer folders, this is a great feature. Like I said, it may be a small thing, but it is an example of MadCap working to make its existing workflow easier and more efficient for the doc team who is creating content using Flare.

HTML5 Output

This beautiful feature is worth the price of the upgrade to me alone. Flare 8 supports a new HTML5-based webhelp output. HTML5 output kicks the traditional 3-pane webhelp output to the curb giving you an almost unlimited number of possibilities for styling your output.

The first image, left, shows you what the default HTML5 output looks like from Flare 8. You’ll see that it is a very modern design that hints at the 3-pane help of lesser tools (grin), but is clean and fresh. Everything is on a single HTML page, including the list of topics (in a styled, un-ordered list), the search field, and the search results field. The actual topic content is loaded in an i-frame, so that all the content on the page (the list of topics, etc.) doesn’t have to be re-downloaded every time you switch topics.

If you turn off CSS styling, you can see that all the stuff is right there in DIVs that you can customize in your CSS.

Do you dream of a WebHelp output that has a drop-down menu-style navigation? Now you can have it. Just do CSS magic to style the list into a menu, and you’re done.

Search results are different in HTML5 output as well (see graphic, right). Now search results are shown in a DIV in the main content window. The results are more “Google-like” and show the topic title and content in the topic that relates to the link, so this is a big win for usability in my opinion.

As always, you can remove the MadCap logo by changing a setting in the Skin Editor. Speaking of the Skin editor, when you open your existing Flare project in Flare 8, you will need to do a couple of things before you generate your first HTML5 output.

First, you need to create an HTML5 skin. In the Project Organizer, right-click on Skins, and select “Add Skin…”. Be sure to base your new skin on either the DefaultHTML5 skin or the LightHTML5 skin. (My first example in this section is the “default” skin; my second example in this section is the “light” skin.) Give your skin a descriptive name, then click Add. Allow Flare to copy the skin to your project (by clicking OK). The skin editor opens with the new skin settings. Make any changes you want, then save the skin.

Next, you need to create a target that uses the HTML5 skin. In the Project Organizer, right-click on Targets, and select “Add Target…”. Be sure to select the HTML5 output type, and give your target a descriptive name, then click Add. Allow Flare to copy the skin to your project (by clicking OK). The target editor opens with the new target settings. On the General tab, make sure your new HTML5 skin is selected in the Skin drop-down list. Make any other changes you want to the target, and save it.

Going through this process will help you not get errors when you try to generate output. (Because, for example, if you were to take an existing target and just switch the output type to HTML5, you would get an error when you tried to build the target, because Flare 8 can’t find an HTML5 skin.)

HTML5 skins are my favorite new feature in Flare 8. This is a game-changing feature, because now that your output is broken out of the 3-pane frame set, you can do just about anything you want to style your content.

PDF and Print Output improvements

If you generate PDF or other print outputs, you are going to see some enhancements that you are going to like. These enhancements make Flare’s output look more professional, and give you added control over what happens in your documents. Since you can’t edit the output when you generate directly to PDF (and you shouldn’t have to… that’s the point of going directly to PDF), these small enhancements can make a powerful difference in your PDF output. For example Flare 8 includes the following print output enhancements:

• Named Destinations for PDF Output. This means you don’t have to do any linking in Acrobat after you generate your output.
• Page Layout breaks independent from chapter breaks. Insert a hard page break wherever you need.
• Repeated table captions. If your table breaks onto two pages, the caption will appear on both tables. You can even add an indicator that says the table continues on the next page.
• More options for setting the initial view of PDF output (like you can currently do in Acrobat).
• Suppress page numbers for specific levels in TOCs and Mini-TOCs. If you want to include H3s in your TOC or Mini-TOC, you don’t necessarily have to give their page numbers.
• Collapse top margin when element appears at the top of a printed page. You set this option in the print target editor, on the advanced tab.
• Improved multi-line support for index entries and TOC entries. If the title of a topic (or index entry) requires two lines, you now have options to edit the indent when the line wraps.
• Better customization of leader characters including spacing, padding, etc.
• Crisper table borders in PDF output.
• New “Sort As” feature for index entries. This feature allows you to enter a term, but have it sort in another location in the index. For example, suppose your product name starts with a number (123Acme Solution). You could set an index entry to sort that by number (appearing at the beginning of the index), by the word “one”, or by the word “Acme”, depending on your needs. This feature helps some non-English languages, as well that have different sorting requirements based on the use of different character sets.

These features work together to provide great PDF output without any tweaking of the generated output.

e-Pub Support

Flare 8 has another new output type: e-Pub. This new output format gives you the ability to publish content for a variety of mobile devices and platforms. This makes it easy to publish your help system in a format that can be read on mobile phones, tablet computers, and other e-Book readers. For more info on the e-Pub platform in general, this Wikipedia article is helpful.

I haven’t tested this feature thoroughly yet, but I’ve heard some great things from other beta testers. I’m excited to hear from other Flare 8 users how they’ve been able to use this as a publishing platform for their content.

Import enhancements for DITA, Word, and Framemaker

In Flare 8 it is much easier to import content. In earlier versions, each time you wanted to import content, you had to first add an import file to the project organizer, then edit the import file. Now the wizard does that work behind the scenes making importing content more intuitive.

Several behind-the-scenes enhancements makes the import process faster and better. I tested this by importing 176 Word documents in a single import. The import was relatively fast (compared to another tool where I imported the same 176 topics), and the imported topics were clean with correct style mappings. I was impressed with how easy it was to import these topics.

Of course the import process into any HAT is dependent on how clean the source files are. My 176 topics were created by around 30 different authors who created the content in a Word document that had locked the styles so you couldn’t do any local formatting. All styling was done by selecting a pre-defined Word style, which is why the importing process for me was so clean.

DITA 1.2 support

Flare 8 imports and exports DITA 2.1. Flare 7, in contrast, was only able to work with DITA 1.1 content. I haven’t done a lot of work with DITA, so this feature isn’t a huge WOW for me, but I know it will matter to a lot of people who do use DITA either for source files or for some type of output.

Improvements to Conditions/Variables

In earlier versions of Flare, you had to be careful not to change the names of conditions or variables, because when you did so, the associations were broken (so the conditions or variables you’d already added to your project would stop working). In Flare 8, you can modify condition and variable names without worrying about breaking the associations. Flare will check the existing topics for instances of the old variables and conditions, and will update them to the new name.

Again, this is a small enhancement, but one that will make things much easier for technical authors.

New licensing model

A huge shift with Flare 8 is a new licensing model. The traditional, single-user license will continue to be available, but now there are a few more options for those who are purchasing multiple licenses. The other licenses are:

As usual, you will want to talk to your sales rep to see what pricing deals may be in place at any given time. They can work up a price quote that will take into account promotions that may be in place, as well as discounts your organization may receive based on the number of licenses and products purchased. You can get a general idea of the price from MadCap’s website, but you should check with your sales rep to see what promotions are currently going on.

Wrap-up

As you can see, Flare 8 launches an impressive number of new features. I’ve been using Flare 8 for about a month now, and it is still–by far–my favorite authoring tool. (And I know, because for some work projects, I’m required to use a competitor’s tool. So, I have experience with current competing software.)

With version 8, you are able to create stellar output in a variety of formats (including ePub, which I didn’t mention above). Flare 8 makes your product look more professional, and makes it easier for you to get that work done quickly and efficiently.

HTML5 output raises the standard of what WebHelp output can look like and how easy it can be for customers to use. I think MadCap has hit a home run with this release of Flare. Let me know in the comments what features you’re most excited about, and what features you wish had made the cut for this version.

Author’s Note: Thanks to Neal Pozner and Rob Hollinger from MadCap Software for their help in getting me the information I needed for this review.