MadCap Software Forums

Hello, The golden rule of word imports is to get the word document as clean as you possibly can before importing. This usually means: Making sure that all formatting is done through styles, not by local formatting (I suspect that your 80,000 styles are caused by Flare making a style for every arbitr...

Hi Nita, First off, by all means, I welcome feedback and being corrected. One of the reasons why I actually post on the forums is so that I can test my knowledge and to see if the good advice that I think that I'm giving is actually good advice. I was cranking along pretty quickly on this one, so I ...

Master pages are also used for Word output, oddly. It's just not mentioned much because Word is definitely the poor, ignored cousin of most other output types. I actually specify which Master Page I'm using for my word output directly from the ToC. I set up a new section break and pick the Master Pa...

I'm no expert, but one thing I read somewhere on these forums is to make sure that you never condition out anything smaller than a sentence (unless it's a "user interface" item). For instance, if one of your outputs used the word "one" and one used the word "two", inste...

A few other tips once you do get going: The initial temptation is to make topics much more granular than they need to be because it feels very 'single-source-y'. When deciding topic length, think about what would be useful to have on a single page of the Web Help, and break the content down there. S...

Oh, devans, one more thing. I just did this myself accidentally.

Double-check that the ToC is actually using the Master Page that you think it's using. I accidentally linked to a Page Layout instead, and I just got this error again.

Excellent, thanks for the explanation Margaret. I had no idea that running headers existed. This is exactly why I participate in the forums... maybe I'll be able to get those stupid H2s and H3s working in Word output with this finally. I could only get the H1s working for some reason.

Hrm, that looks like about what I do, devans. I'm not sure... maybe make sure that your headings are true H1 headings, not H1.Heading 1 or some such as a result of the Word import? Maybe that will solve your issue. Wclass, I must confess I'm trying to understand what you did and I am definitely miss...

Ah HA! This popped up again while editing my master page, and I got it. In case this helps anyone else out, the issue was a comment. I had added a comment inside a table row, but not inside a table cell. Even though it was just a comment <!-- -->, Flare objected strenuously any time I did anything i...

Flare's word output is unusually creative in its ability to mess things up. Could you provide a screenshot of the incorrect spacing. Is there some styles it messes up in particular, or is it pretty much everything?

Try setting up a div around both items with the page-break: inside attribute set to false. I have one that is set up this way named "KeepTogether" that I use all the time. EDIT: Sorry, trying to move fast this morning. This might be a better solution, depending on what you're trying to do....

I've also seen this error. I somehow got it resolved, but I didn't document how I did it (shame!). Are you using a Master Page for the word output, or a page layout? Apparently, I'm using the standard System Heading.Level1 variable, but I'm doing it from a Master Page. I think that might have been k...

Excellent, glad to hear it!

Wow, that's impressive Devans. Do you use integrated source control? If so, which one?

I've discovered the same issue with Images. I'm going to have to move a very large number of images into sub-folders to improve Flare's performance when browsing through that folder in the Content Explorer. I'm not particularly looking forward to that.

To add to what Nita said, in my (much lesser!) experience, the only issue with the "mc-next-tag" is when the current style is a class of a tag, and the next style is supposed to be the same tag with no class. In all other cases I think it works fine. What I usually use, like Nita, is a key...

I've noticed some bugs when using a mixture of "em" and "px" widths. Making them consistently one or the other might help with the XML editor issues.

First off, yes, this is very possible. I'm not really familiar with perl scripts, but I decided to practice my regex kung fu and successfully performed a find and replace using your test code in NotePad++: Find string : <ol.*>(\s*<h\d.*\s*</h\d>\s*)</ol> Replace string : \1 Explanation What this cod...

Moving forward, removing the auto-numbering from the Word files first is definitely a good idea. For fixing what' already done, you can probably do what you need to do with a good regular expression Find and Replace. While Flare does have some built-in support for this, people usually use a third pa...

I'd definitely file a bug report. Data loss is unacceptable, and MadCap support is quite good. Not sure if you have a maintenance plan or not, but even without one, MadCap is usually pretty good for the truly serious stuff from what I hear.

I highly recommend the "exclude content not linked directly or indirectly from the target" option of the HTML target's Advanced tab. It prevents a lot of gunk getting thrown in there, which can help with build times. More importantly, it stops Flare from including completely different vers...

I've encountered an issue where changes that I make to the checkboxes of Batch targets do not always get saved, but that's it. That issue is new in Flare 11. I have to close and reopen the batch target sometimes to get it to notice that I'm changing stuff and it should be paying attention. Obligator...

Completely agreed, the poor scaling of Capture text is a huge problem. Combined with the scaling issues of the drawn shapes and even the images themselves, it severely damages the professionalism of the end product. The latest version of Capture was a major improvement (the crop and batch replace fe...

Just a random note: adding a div into a list is secretly a bad idea if you ever need to create Word output. There is a bug where the list item where the div is starts with a blank line in Word output, which is very annoying.

Wow, thanks for this tip Dave. I hadn't realized that you could name meta tags at the target level and then reference them with the script! This just allowed me to meet the requirement that each of our different webhelps be clearly labelled without having to individually maintain virtually identical...