Future Flare features

[Robotman]

What features would you like implemented in future versions of Flare?

I put a similar post in the Flare Slack channel but figured there is a different audience on the two platforms.

I imagine fix the bugs will be one, but what new features would you like to see?

[AlexFox]

Oh boy, I could talk about this for a while, but here's a few ideas off the top of my head....

• XML editor needs to have better support for more modern web standards such as flex and grid, so you can more accurately see how your content will look in the final output.
• I'd like a native option to mimic RoboHelp's dynamic content abilities so an end user can use a dropdown to switch between different conditionally tagged content.
• MadCap should look at the existing interactive elements in Flare that are very JavaScript heavy and see if they can be replicated in pure CSS (e.g. html popover can pretty much totally replace image popups and requires no JS). This would allow some interactive elements to be used in Clean XHTML outputs.
• MadCap search needs a pretty significant QOL pass as there are several issues with it such as not being able to search for certain characters or the word "not"
• Snippet conditions should apply to Capture images within those snippets e.g. I should be able to toggle different annotations in my images if they are properly tagged by using condition tags at the snippet level.
• Printed Output page numbering in TOCs needs a bug fix pass as there's definitely odd behaviour there which often requires the use of multiple different page layouts to get Flare to properly apply numbering to the correct pages.

[Paul Griffiths]

A decent Relationship Table Editor would be top of my list, and has been for several years.

[robdocsmith]

Busy times here at the moment but here's some that struck me recently:

How about a short cut to be able to print or output a subset of a TOC? Sometimes I just want to check something and don't want to wait for the whole shebang to build. And I can't be bothered making a copy target and subset TOC. Say if you right clicked a topic or parent topic in your TOC, select Print Draft or similar, select the Target you want to build to and off Flare goes. It uses all the stuff in the target for type, name, styles, conditions, variables, it uses the stuff that's already in the TOC entries for levelling. Man I'd use that pretty much every day.

How about a nice and easy way to print off a draft of a topic (or a document) showing all conditionalised items in the colours they are specified in. I know this is more a limitation with HTML, but it would be hyper useful to bug check stuff. I know there are some work arounds that allow you to do it for block elements, but they don't work for inline ones.

How about allowing variables to have a formula in them so I don't need to enter information twice. Say variables.lengthmm = 25.4 x variables.lengthinches. That's pretty niche I know but I'd find it handy.

Simplifying the table styles dialog and output. Seriously, the CSS the table style editor spits out is hella long and duplicative. The dialog itself is powerful but also has its quirks.

Simplifying the location of things that are currently hidden away inside skins. Make images, text and styles available outside of the skin in the resources folder like, um, the other resources instead of stuck inside a flskn entity. Why can't a skin be an open xml file like a target, containing all the links in plain text to its resources?

Rob

[NorthEast]

Simplifying the location of things that are currently hidden away inside skins. Make images, text and styles available outside of the skin in the resources folder like, um, the other resources instead of stuck inside a flskn entity. Why can't a skin be an open xml file like a target, containing all the links in plain text to its resources?

This is sort-of available now, as you can use CSS variables for most of the styles in the skin, using the Branding skin and/or inserting them manually. This means you can use CSS variables in your stylesheet to reference things like images in your content folder, and styles for any fonts/colours/sizes/etc.

The Branding skin provides a slightly easier method to insert the CSS variables in the other skins, but it only allows you to set a handful of things. But you can manually type in CSS variables in the skin for most (all?) of the styles that are available. The downside is that the variable text will be illegible in most places, as they're not designed to show enough characters.

Just make sure you don't select the 'Resolve CSS variables' setting in the target.

[Psider]

Reports need a good going over I think. The fact the Export to CSV only exports the first page of results is a pain in the posterior.

[jjorissen]

Decent support for CSS Flexbox.
It works in HTML5 output, but the error messages Flare shows after each save are really annoying.