MadCap Software Forums

Hi Nita,

There is confusion in terminology. Flare files are "topics" but tech writers also tend to call help pages "topics" as well. I was trying to make the distinction between flare topics and output topics. I'm not sure that's what you mean by "subject". But my point is that the topics we create ...

In my thinking a snippet is something you would reuse multiple times within a single document/output (like warnings), whereas a topic is something that would only appear once within a single document/output type (because why would you repeat the same subject in multiple places in the same document ...

Hi Marjorie,

That's a great article. What it shows is exactly what I want to do. I want to combine my task topics with my concept topic to create one larger help topic. Unfortunately, this won't work on Flare's TOC because it will just make a folder for the concept topic and place the task topics ...

Hi All,

I'm hoping someone can help me with some tips about how to structure my topics and snippets to help me get the results I want in my HTML5 Help and PDF output. Here's my situation:

- Our help uses drop-downs extensively, much like the Flare 9 help does. So for example in one topic we may ...

Thanks Nita,

I searched all over in the help for this, but couldn't find it. Need to work on my search words I guess.

Thanks again for your help. Not the first time you've helped me, and probably won't be the last.


Thanks,
Josh

Hi Everyone,

Because of complaints from users, I'd like to make the number hyperlink color in my index a different color than the text. However, I'm not finding a CSS setting that will allow me to do this. It seems like you change the text on everything or nothing. So for example I have an index ...

Thanks Lisa. I understand now, just hadn't seen those terms used for snippets. In my reorganization I always favor the help because that's the authoritative source of information. I don't have a PDF version of the help, just PDF documents that use pieces of the help.

ChoccieMuffin, I am including ...

I'm not sure I understand what you mean regarding snippetblock vs. snippettext. Do you mean converting the snippet to text after you insert it?

And I understand how to use snippets in the way you describe. I'm using them that way in other parts of my docs now. The issue I came across this release ...

Thanks Lisa,

I'd thought of conditionalizing the rest of the topic, but I've always had logical trouble with that. Seems illogical to conditionalize 95% of a topic just to get the remaining 5%. I'd rather just deal with the 5% I guess. Unfortunately I guess Flare doesn't have any support for such a ...

Hi Everyone,

I have help topics that use multiple drop-down text areas. I have a PDF output that I would like to single source one of these drop-down text areas in. Not all of them, just one of them. I figured this would be easy enough to put the drop-down into a snippet, then just add the snippet ...

Thanks for your reply, Lisa. Unfortunately I never had the "Enable partial word searching" option selected in my target. My target is exactly the same for the two releases, so it can't be an option in there. The only major change I made was to add a set of 40 topics, but I can't imagine how those ...

Hi Everyone,

I have discovered a big problem with my help system regarding the Search_Chunk xml and js files in the output Data folder.

In the previous release I had 31 of these pairs of files. In the current release I have 91, which seems like a huge jump considering the fact that I didn't ...

Thanks Margaret and Dave for your help. Dave, your CSS works perfectly. Probably a combination of me staring at the code for too long and not fully understanding how contextual selectors work.

Thanks again for your help.

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to style some nested drop-downs in Flare for HTML5 Help output, and I'm having some trouble making the style on the nested drop-down work. I've already styled standard drop-downs; these are for special drop-downs. To make my life easy, I'd like to use the same CSS class I've ...

Thanks Jason,

I was hoping for a setting so it would happen automatically. The problem with editing that file is that it will be overwritten every time I do a new build, and I don't think I can trust our translation agency to do that. But it's good to know I wasn't just missing the setting. Sounds ...

Hi Everyone,

Does anyone know if it is possible to change the order of the left menu's tabs in HTML5 output? It seems to default to Contents, Index, Glossary, Browse Sequence. I think I'd rather have it as Contents, Browse Sequence, Glossary, Index.

I've looked through the skin to find where you ...

Thanks for the ideas, Ramon.

The complaints I'm receiving aren't so much the fact that the help is huge, it's more a fact that the help is so much larger than the product itself. If you have a product that's 10MB and the help for that product is 100MB, people start to complain.

I hadn't considered ...

Hi Everyone,

I've run into complaints from the developers for the software I write a help system for because of its size. The help system is around 10MB, and the size is largely because of screenshots. This wasn't so bad in the past, but they recently decided to translate the help system into 9 ...