MadCap Software Forums

Because I loathe duplicating work, I'd look at ways to use mobile-like documentation for the desktop app, to bring the two sets of documentation closer together. If short feature descriptions are okay for the mobile version, are longer ones really required for the desktop? Longer topics/walk-through...

So, I really wanted to use text pop-ups, but I was getting frustrated with not being able to set the width. The width set on the pop-ups was so narrow that I ended up with only one or two words on each line, rendering the pop-up virtually useless. I remember having this problem years ago, and never ...

Personally, I like the ribbon - the main reason is that I can customise the quick access bar and put the functions that I use all the time right up there at the top. Yes! That was my first reaction to seeing the ribbon-ization section of the release notes. I only use a handful of the toolbar button...

I've had this problem both with projects imported from RoboHelp and with projects started from scratch in Flare. I see it more frequently in projects with large numbers of topics (100+) but I've seen it a couple of times even in smaller projects.

Sadly, this seems to be an ongoing problem, especially in very large projects or big rearranging jobs. I've reported the problem and sent in a sample project, but hear crickets in the distance... If you're having this problem, please report it and send in an example. http://madcapsoftware.com/bugs/s...

Heh. Kevin beat me to it

Yes, you should be able to open the project, but some things don't translate well back to older versions, especially before version 4.0. For example, I lost a lot of work in a stylesheet, once, because I opened a Flare 4 project in Flare 3 and made a very simple change to the stylesheet in 3. Someth...

If I set the Expand All toggler to call all of the named elements, that works - sort of. Two issues: It toggles all the elements. So, it closes the open ones and opens the closed ones. It also doesn't change the icon - so the lower togglers still look like they can be opened. Having two togglers ope...

For better or worse, my documentation makes heavy use of togglers. One of the things I've struggled with is making it fast to find the specific information you're looking for, but not requiring you to click a bazillion links if you just want to browse through the information. So I set out on a quest...

Using the keyboard to select text seems to be less prone to unexpected jumps or other weirdness.

Place your cursor, then hold down Shift and use the arrow keys to move the cursor.

There may be a more elegant way to do this, but one way to get stuff in where you're having problems placing a cursor: - Create a <p> elsewhere in the document - Cut the empty <p> (right-click on the tag, choose Edit > Cut) - Right-click on the first <table> tag, choose Edit > Paste After I do this ...

Can you post some details so we can see what you're working with? The code from that section of your topic, and the relevant items in the style sheet would help. Without that, I can only make a guess. If the image is inside a <p> tag, and the <p> has no width (or is set to auto), then you may wind u...

Beautiful! I love it.

Why on earth didn't I find this program years ago?

Thanks!

Well, you could pop open the topic in a text editor and create a form button, like this: http://www.htmlgoodies.com/tutorials/bu ... hp/3478871

Not as easy as a menu option to Insert > Button, but it should work (in theory - I've not tried it)

Thanks.

Since I don't want to remove all spans, I guess I'll take a look at FAR HTML.

I have a project that came from Robohelp, originally, and was in Flare for about 6 months before I took it over. I've been working on cleaning it up, including what was effectively a rewrite of the style sheet. Some of the changes I made remove the need to use spans to apply formatting to specific c...

I think using a percent for image dimensions (width, height) should set the image size based on the container size. So, width: 100% should set the image width to take up the whole width of the container it's in (stretching the image side-to-side if necessary). To set the image width to 100% of the i...

"My items in the Project Manager are alphabetical..." That would be very useful! Did you turn on some setting or something? I don't seem to have that feature. Hmm... not that I know of. Maybe it's just magic :P I cannot come up with a plausible reason why it wouldn't sort alphabetically w...

If you use the same settings for all the targets, could you set up one PDF output target, then just flip the TOC and enter a new filename? That's essentially what I do for my sort-of-monthly release notes - every release I create a new TOC, then in the target select the TOC and type the new filename...

Or if you're not keen on opening in a text editor, you can right-click on the <div> in the left margin of the XML editor and select Unbind (or sometimes right-click > Edit > Unbind). That'll remove the <div> without removing the <p> tags inside it.

Wow. That's a lot of targets. Presents some interesting problems :) As far as I can tell, there's no built-in way to handle such a large number of targets (submit a feature request!). You can use naming conventions to organize the list, so that related targets stay together alphabetically. Doesn't h...

I tend to go one step further. I'll highlight it with a conditional tag called DoNotUse, which is excluded in all of my targets. Then I'll stick in an index token called Follow Up. The Follow Up index tokens show up in the Index Explorer, giving me a quick way to get back to all the stuff that I nee...

I run into this, too, and it drives me nuts. It's gotten to the point where I don't rename anything unless it's absolutely essential - I'll deal with misleading or incorrect file names rather than hunt down all the broken links that result from renaming. When I do have to rename files, I'll rename o...

If the <p> style should only show up in Printed output, here's what I'd do: 1. Use the Print medium for your printed output (set the stylesheet medium on the Advanced tab of your target setup). 2. Set the style as "display: none" for all other mediums (non-print, or whatever others you've ...

Once you've copied the xml file to that folder, close and restart Firefox. In the search box, which is usually in the upper right corner of the browser window, you can select a search engine. Mine defaults to Google. There's a little down-arrow button to the right of the search engine logo (left of ...